Reason and Revelation: Being an Examination Into the Nature and Contents of Scripture Revelation ...

Google

This is a digital copy of a book lhal w;ls preserved for general ions on library shelves before il was carefully scanned by Google as pari of a project

to make the world's books discoverable online.

Il has survived long enough for the copyright to expire and the book to enter the public domain. A public domain book is one thai was never subject

to copy right or whose legal copyright term has expired. Whether a book is in the public domain may vary country to country. Public domain books

are our gateways to the past, representing a wealth of history, culture and knowledge that's often dillicull lo discover.

Marks, notations and other marginalia present in the original volume will appear in this file - a reminder of this book's long journey from the

publisher lo a library and linally lo you.

Usage guidelines

Google is proud lo partner with libraries lo digili/e public domain materials and make them widely accessible. Public domain books belong to the
public and we are merely their custodians. Nevertheless, this work is expensive, so in order lo keep providing this resource, we have taken steps to
prevent abuse by commercial panics, including placing Icchnical restrictions on automated querying.
We also ask that you:

+ Make n on -commercial use of the files We designed Google Book Search for use by individuals, and we request thai you use these files for
personal, non -commercial purposes.

+ Refrain from automated querying Do not send automated queries of any sort lo Google's system: If you are conducting research on machine
translation, optical character recognition or other areas where access to a large amount of text is helpful, please contact us. We encourage the
use of public domain materials for these purposes and may be able to help.

+ Maintain attribution The Google "watermark" you see on each lile is essential for informing people about this project and helping them find
additional materials through Google Book Search. Please do not remove it.

+ Keep it legal Whatever your use. remember that you are responsible for ensuring that what you are doing is legal. Do not assume that just
because we believe a book is in the public domain for users in the United States, that the work is also in the public domain for users in other

countries. Whether a book is slill in copyright varies from country lo country, and we can'l offer guidance on whether any specific use of
any specific book is allowed. Please do not assume that a book's appearance in Google Book Search means it can be used in any manner
anywhere in the world. Copyright infringement liability can be quite severe.

About Google Book Search

Google's mission is to organize the world's information and to make it universally accessible and useful. Google Book Search helps readers
discover the world's books while helping authors and publishers reach new audiences. You can search through I lie lull lexl of 1 1 us book on I lie web
al |_-.:. :.-.-:: / / books . qooqle . com/|

i

"Br

REASON AND REVELATION.

REASON AND REVELATION.

BEING AN EXAMINATION INTO THE NATURE

AND CONTENTS OP SCEIPTURE REVELATION AS

COMPARED WITH OTHER FORMS OF TRUTH.

\

BT

WILLIAM HORNE, M.A.

HENRY S. KING & CO., LONDON

1876.

[The rights of translation, and reproduction are reserved.]

PBEFACE.

\

The questions discussed in the following pages are those lying
at the basis of a Christian theology. Until they are settled,
it appears to me premature to enter upon the particular details
of Christian doctrine, as expounded by any of the various
parties who profess to be its legitimate interpreters. I have
not, therefore, felt called upon to treat of specific dogmas,
although the argument has led me to the expression of an
opinion regarding dogmatic theology as a system of thought.

Unless I am greatly mistaken, the attention of the majority
of thoughtful men of our time is directed, more than at any
previous period, to the subjects underlying revelation and
religion. This is largely to be accounted for by the recently
awakened interest in ethnic religions. The point of view from
which these are recognised has naturally suggested the pos-
sibility of a science of comparative religion, and this again an
explanation of the nature of religion and its manifestations.
In addition to this, there are causes which have always been
$ more or less operative in the same direction, but which of late

i years have re-asserted themselves with increasing emphasis.

^ These may be conveniently summed up by what is known as

V) the culture of the age. The invariable demand of those who

speak in the name of culture, on the presentation of a written
revelation, has been, Explain its nature and contents in relation
to other truths ; tell us how and what it is.
£ Many authors have written ably and exhaustively on different

divisions of this subject, but it has never yet been treated as a

VI PREFACE.

whole. My aim has been to supply a connected view of the
various parts. I am fully conscious that the execution of this
design has fallen far below even my own idea of it.

As a rule, I have only given references to writers, whose
statements I have criticised. It is the more necessary, there-
fore, to acknowledge in this place the help I have got from
many books. There are two authors, however, to whom I owe
so much, that it would be ungrateful not to mention them : I
mean Ewald and Rothe.

The line of inquiry here carried out was first undertaken for
a Scottish inter-university prize of jBIOO, offered some time
ago by a gentleman whose name was not given to the public,
for an essay on " The Nature and Contents of Scripture Re-
velation as Compared with other Forms of Truth." The ad-
judicators were Principal Tulloch, Principal Caird, and Dr.
Hannah, then Warden of Trinity College, Glenalmond. The
prize was adjudged to the present writer.

In preparing the essay for the press I have entirely re-
written, very much enlarged, and completely re-modelled it.
The fundamental conception, however, is the same.

South Strebt, St. Andrews,
August, 1876.

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER I.

INTRODUCTORY REMARKS

PAGE
1

CHAPTER II.

MYTHOLOGY AND KOSMICAL REVELATION .

CHAPTER III.

ANCIENT AND MODERN THEISM

18

CHAPTER IV.

THE DIVINE IN NATURE .

32

CHAPTER V.

THE PLACE OF CONSCIENCE IN THE REVELATION OF 8PIRITUAL
TRUTH. — THE ORIGIN OF MORAL IDEAS ....

49

CHAPTER VI.

MIRACLE AND EXPERIENCE. — OF MIRACLES AS A REVELATION OF
THE DIVINE TO THE SPIRITUAL CONSCIOUSNESS IN MAN

CHAPTER VII.

THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF 8PIRITUAL FACTS.

88

CHAPTER VIII.

THE MANIFESTATION OF SPIRITUAL TRUTH

101

CHAPTER IX.

THE SPIRITUAL IN JUDAISM AND ELSEWHERE .

120

VU1 CONTENTS.

CHAPTER X. pagk

THE RECORD OF THE SPIRITUAL MANIFESTATION AMONG THE JEWS 137

4

CHAPTER XL

THE TRUE AND FALSE SANCTITY OF THE BIBLE RECORD . 157

CHAPTER XII.

THE CONTENTS OF THE BIBLE. — SPIRITUAL TRUTH AND RELIGIOUS

MYSTERIES 184

CHAPTER XIII.

THE ORGANON OF SPIRITUAL TRUTH 206

CHAPTER XIV.

THE BIBLE AND THEOLOGY 222

CHAPTER XV.

THE BIBLE AND SCIENCE 243

CHAPTER XVI.

RELIGIOUS IDEAS AND METAPHYSICAL CONCEPTIONS, WITH RE-
FERENCE TO SOME RECENT SPECULATION ON THE UNKNOW-
ABLE, AND THE LIMITS OF RELIGIOUS THOUGHT . 265

CHAPTER XVH.

CHRISTIANITY AND MORALITY, AS ETHICAL IDEALS AND SOCIAL

FORCES 285

CHAPTER XVIII.

THE RELATION OF THE BIBLE TO THE SPIRITUAL LIFE AND

RELIGIOUS HISTORY OF THE FUTURE 829

CHAPTER XIX.

CONCLUDING REMARKS 357

REASON AND REVELATION.

U

CHAPTER I.

INTRODUCTORY REMARKS.

" We have for the most part only believers in the Bible, and not believers in
revelation ; for even those who call themselves believers in revelation under-
stand by revelation nothing else bat the Bible."

Scripture Revelation suggests two lines of inquiry; that of
Revelation in general, and that of Scripture Revelation in particu-
lar. The one is a mode of the other, and in determining the nature
of Revelation in itself we shall at the same time touch the funda-
mental characteristic of Scripture Revelation. What is true of
Revelation in itself may, perhaps, be more clearly ascertained in the
first place, as much as possible, independently of the Scripture
records. No discussion of the subject, however, can be thorough
which does not include these documents. As data in the present
investigation, the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments must
not be regarded as Revelation in itself, but rather as a form or
record of a Revelation, and as such illustrative of the wider
question.

Such a method has, at all events, the merit of greater fairness as
compared with the method formerly current, and to some extent still
prevalent. It simplifies a subject which is already sufficiently com-
plicated. The popular idea of Revelation (partly the cause and partly
the effect of the earlier method), as a communication of a set of doc-
trines contained in a particular book, has given rise to much confusion
of thought, not only on this fundamental point in theology, but on
every subject connected with biblical science. This popular view,
starting at first from a limited conception of Revelation, as presented
in the Old and New Testaments and reflected in the theological
systems drawn from them, although traceable to very early times,
was only fully developed and perfected into a theory about the
Reformation era. The necessities of the time compelled the leaders

2 EEASON AND REVELATION.

of that movement to repel authority by authority, and to assert a
principle which, while correct in its most general conception, was
made the occasion of constructing a dogma of Revelation differing
only in appearance from the opposing Catholic doctrine. The
general result of the teaching of the Reformation on the subject is
sufficient evidence of the correctness of these remarks. We are only
now beginning to free ourselves from the narrow and formal prin-
ciples of that ecclesiastical era, and to breathe in airier, regions.

It is quite true that our bonds were first broken by the Protestant
party, but not by the Protestant reform mode of thought. We owe
our freedom to what some may think foreign aid. We are indebted
to the philosophical and historical schools for our manumission, and
not, directly at least, to our theological antecedents. Indirectly, no
doubt, the revolt of the sixteenth century rendered similar revolts
possible by presenting to all time a spirit of freedom. Critical
investigation has thrown new light upon the Scripture records, and
in doing so has shown elements in them which conservative theology
is slow to allow. The historical spirit, so keenly susceptible to the
reality that lies beneath past forms of thought and extinct nation-
alities, has opened our eyes to the Jewish nationality and literature.
It has also made manifest the possibility of a distinction between
Revelation and Scripture, and given us, instead of the one Divine
element in both, the two essential elements of vital and intelligible
spiritual sympathy, God and man. The notion that man was not
co-operative in the act of Revelation is contradicted both by the
nature of the act itself and the record of Revelation which we
possess. It seems necessary that in any communication to intelli-
gent man intelligent action should be presupposed. By the laws of
our constitution we are prevented from conceiving that process of
inpouring or inbreathing, once a favourite mode of representing the
act of Revelation. If Revelation be, as its name implies, an unveil-
ing, there must be not only the mind that performs the act but
the mind that perceives the facts or things unveiled. Were man
passive in such a process, it is difficult to see how the Revelation
could affect him. Whatever we know in our ordinary sense
experience, we are conscious of through some modification of our
nature. In all perceptions the personal function is a necessary
factor in the operation ; and in the highest perceptions of all, and
those ultimately regulative of our higher life, we cannot but think
this self modification operative. If we deny self determination in
the reception of spiritual truths, we seem to be reduced to mere

INTRODUCTORY REMARKS. 3

magical media — media which we are usable to connect with the
motions of intelligence. The only way in which we can conceive a
spiritual intelligence as conscious of any object is by conceiving that
spiritual intelligence as operative in the act. To speak of a
Revelation by one being to another concerning some sphere of truth,
without, at the same time, conceiving the Revelation as consciously
perceived, is absurd. In this consciousness on the part of the being
who receives the communication we have given us a similarity of
nature, in some manner, between that being and the one who makes
the communication.

Here we have standing ground to combat the limited analysis
of some psychologists and the confined view of some physicists.
Thus, if man has, as we shall afterwards see to be actually the.
case, a nature in common with the Divine, the possibility ot
attaining a knowledge of supra-sensible things is guaranteed to
him; and through his own nature, if not through the external world,
a way is opened up to that which transcends everything usually
included in mere nature, but need not therefore, as some suppose,
transcend all experience. In this sense it is quite true, as some
writers affirm, that there is no supernatural, properly so-called.
If the basis of what is commonly called the supernatural is found
to be within us, the supernatural is then merely a name for a sphere
of experience which, in one respect at least, is on the same platform
as the natural, although relating to a different order of truths. In
this way the statement may be accepted that there is no super-
natural, or the equivalent statement that everything is supernatural
or natural, according as we are pleased to rogard it. But what is of
more importance than any such distinction is the fact that the
development of an experience usually excluded by extreme physicists
and psychologists is a true evolution of the nature of man, and has
facts corresponding to it as certainly as our sensible experience has
its corresponding objects.

It might be difficult to convince some physicists of the reality of
these things ; but it would not be more difficult for one to whom
these spiritual experiences were familiar to do so than it would be for
the supposed physicist to convince any one of the reality of sensible
objects corresponding to a set of mental modifications, of which the
person needing conviction declared he had and could have no conscious-
ness. In any Revelation, I hold that our spiritual nature is brought
face to face with spiritual facts, and I am entitled for all practical
purposes to maintain their reality as much as the physicist is en-

4 REASON AND REVELATION.

titled to maintain the reality of the facts of which he is conscious.
The objection usually taken against what, for the sake of distinction,
we mnst call the supernatural or spiritual, is an objection taken too
often in toto and on the very threshold of the subject. But this is
not a fair way of dealing with any question. It forecloses all inquiry,
and is quite unscientific. What does science say to its votary above
all things P Is its language not, how ignorant we are, how limited
our knowledge, walk humbly therefore amid the great unknown ?
Yet here in thick darkness, at least with purblind eyes, dazzled, too,
by the blaze from one quarter of their heaven, the objectors we speak
of cry out at once on the bare mention of the spiritual : " This can-
not be, we cannot see it, and therefore we shall round our know-
ledge to one sphere. We shall stand upon our little island here,
with the untraversed deep around us, and call this our world.
Beyond is nothing to us. We shall not even sally out to it. We
shall not chase the horizon that streams with light and glory coming
from otherwhere than our small world, to see if perchance we can
touch it, or learn if it will fly, and flying allure us with its light
into regions of illimitable expanse, realms of glory, which would
dispel some of our darkness, correct some of our conceptions even
of this world, and amend perhaps our notions of the limits of the
knowable. We shall not do this. We Bhall sail about our creeks,
whose every shallow we know, whose perturbations we can descry
and signal with our storm drums. We shall not venture on any
voyage of discovery, even with the most skilled spiritual pilot of
the past, lest we lose ourselves in the shoreless sea of the unknown."
This is no exaggerated representation of the attitude of modern
science to what is called the spiritual. It is in many cases as blind
to it as the ancient mind was to the modern conception of physical
law. Those who hold this position in regard to spiritual truth seem
to forget, that as experience in these formerly comparatively un-
known and therefore supposed arbitrary fields of action enabled
men to reduce natural facts to law and order, so experience in the
supernatural or spiritual fields which Revelation makes known to
the human spirit may also exhibit, if not the same kind of order
in their phenomena, at all events the reality of these phenomena.
The scientific reform, like all reformations, has been violent. In its
reaction from the supernatural, or rather the superstitious, it has left
half the truth behind. Obedient only to its primary impulse, it
imagines everything solved when it traces succession in sensible
experience, and rarely seems prompted to an explanation of anything

INTRODUCTORY REMARKS. 5

farther. Revelation, on the contrary, has little to do with the work of
science, and seeks rather what lies underneath the antecedents and
consequents of sensible experience. At this point we are met by the
supreme difficulty of passing in thought from the seen to the unseen,
— the possibility or impossibility of such a passage ; we are brought
in short to the battle ground of all Revelation, viz., the mode in
which spiritual truth becomes known to man, and the facts which
form the body of this spiritual Revelation.

CHAPTER II.

KOSMICAL REVELATION.

" The past had always something true. ... In a different time, in a
different place, it is always some other side of oar common human nature that
has been developing itself."

The difficulty attending any investigation of the question regarding
the mode in which spiritual truth is (what is termed) revealed to
man cannot be exaggerated. It has been maintained, on the one
hand, that there has been spiritual truth among men apart from
what many are in the habit of regarding as a special revelation of
it ; and, on the other, it is asserted that all such spiritual knowledge
is derived by tradition from some original special revelation,
possibly from the Jewish. There are facts that have been held as
countenancing both theories. In the remains of ancient mythologies,
as well as in present religions other than the Christian, points of
elevation, rising apparently to the height of genuine spiritual insight
into spiritual truth, have been reached by seemingly independent
means. While again, mingled with these, are to be found striking
resemblances to many narrative portions of the Jewish and Chris-
tian revelations, forcibly suggesting to many minds some actual
connection of the one with the other. But a more painstaking
investigation of primitive forms of thought, especially by means of
comparative religion and comparative philology, has overthrown
much that was formerly considered to give likelihood to both
explanations.

There are two general conclusions bearing on the theories now
mentioned, and forming, in a manner, a summary of the argu-
ments supplied by the two comparative studies just alluded to :
viz., that from comparative religion, which gives us the natural
development of savage theology and shows that the deities recog-
nised by the primitive man are not debased forms of the one true
God revealed to some primeval ancestor; and that from com-
parative philology, which lends support to the theory that external
nature alone does not reveal the spiritual to man. While both con-
spire to prove that the representative idea of the spiritual sphere,
viz., God, is not revealed through nature ; and that the so-called

EOSMIGAL REVELATION. 7

revelations read by men through this medium were kosmical and
not spiritual, and attained the form of spiritual verities by a sub-
jective process, thus separating mythology from historic religion.
According to this, there would be, so far as regards the derivative
theory, no necessary connection between the Old and New Testa-
ment revelations and those supposed revelations found elsewhere.
Nor was it ever sufficiently realised that the derivative theory, now
almost exploded, is based upon a series of suppositions none of
which are certainly true. It must exhibit a real and not an ap-
parent similarity between the original and derivative conceptions ;
and this, as we have seen, is rendered daily more and more difficult.
There is the equally arduous task of explaining how the in-
fluence of a particular people could have become prevalent among
peoples so numerous and so widely separated. And here the ex-
pounders of the theory in question have not merely to contend
against the conclusions reached by mythologists and philologists,
But have to combat the more exact and reliable conclusions estab-
lished by ethnological researches* And when all this has been done,
it remains to be seen whether the supposition of degeneracy lying
at the bottom of this theory is correct or no.

The latter hypothesis has never, so far as I am aware, been any-
thing more than an hypothesis. It is one of those sweeping general-
isations, often as not the result of a very general prejudice, which
form a starting point for theorists too indolent to acquaint them-
selves with, facts. One labour more awaits those who would enter
upon this task. If' the theory of degeneracy be correct to fact, it
must be possible to state by what laws, supported by what data, the
various religions have assumed such divergences from their original
and typical form. In the religions or modifications . of religious
belief connected with Christianity, such as Gnosticism and
Islamism, for example, these positions have been established, and
the relation between the pure and hybrid systems demonstrated. In
the religions of many of the lower tribes we can see where Chris-
tianity has affected and coloured the basal elements of indigenous
belief ; where, for instance, as has frequently been the case, a moral
and sometimes truly spiritual conception has been superinduced
upon one merely kosmical. This has happened very frequently
through the intercourse of Christians with barbarous communities.
The skeleton of some particular pagan myth, while remaining the
same, has completely changed its meaning and complexion by con-
tact with Christian conceptions. The local myths have been, in

8 REASON AND REVELATION.

fact, the trunks on which the new growth has been more or less
successfully grafted. These myths have in such cases fulfilled for
the new Christian ideas very much the same office that language
permanently fulfils for thought. Schools of philosophy may rise
and fall, science and speculation and poetry may advance ; but in
every stage they accept the framework of existing language into
which they throw their new thoughts. But, while these later
modifications in natural religion produced by the Christian and
Jewish revelations can be traced with tolerable accuracy, the
origin of the religious beliefs peculiar to American and African
tribes, the genesis of the more cultured systems of Egypt, Persia,
India, and China, clearly does not Spring from the Semitic develop-
ment.

The non- Christian systems, both in nature and aim, differ from
the Semitic, and bear manifest marks of having been worked out by
independent effort and by processes very similar in every case.
The results of the action of the human mind everywhere and at all
times on this subject bear the same amount of resemblance to each
other as the outcome of their endeavours in other directions does.
However much we may be struck at first sight by the diversity
in colour and form, there is an inherent bond uniting all natural
exertions of the human spirit. Abnormal operations, it is true, are
quite as much subject to law as normal actions, although the study
of them is generally attended with much greater difficulty, because
their effects have greater complexity. This has a very direct bear-
ing upon the position here taken up after due consideration, viz.,
that whatever opinion we may form regarding a primitive revela-
tion common to the human race, the simple mythologies of half
cultured men and the more elaborate developments of civilised
communities were not abnormal and the result of a perverted form
of such a revelation, but were perfectly normal, and the outcome of
the operation of the human mind upon the external world.

They are the creeds of nature worshippers, so far as we can
apply that expression to them. The general feature of oriental
paganism, whether in western Asia, Egypt, Persia, or India, as
well as those forms of paganism in a lower stage, was a more or less
distinct recognition of what we now call forces in nature, but which
were recognised by the early mind with much less abstraction.
The life of man in that condition of human development may well
be supposed, as indeed has been proved again and again, to have
existed in a confused and commingled form which is well represented

KOSMICAL REVELATION. *

in the literature and beliefs of the great Aryan and Turanian families.
It was what may be called the indeterminate period ; a period when
religions, poetical, and scientific elements were blended. It was
the unreflective age of humanity. Nature and the objects it pre-
sented were regarded as individual living agents. Personal life
seen in nature is the point of view from which we must regard the
childhood of our race. Language no doubt had a great influence
upon the conceptions of early thinkers. Its tyranny even in our
days. is seldom sufficiently felt; it has materially helped to form
matured as well as childish systems of philosophy. The tendency to
use language without inquiring very deeply into its original relation
to fact is very noteworthy. We are constantly in danger of reason-
ing from expressions, instead of reasoning from the facts which
these expressions represent. We are as notoriously realistic in
some directions as the men in early times were, although we have
lost much of their power of concrete imagination.

Living, as we very often do, in a verbal world, and surrounded by
mental conceptions necessarily embodied in a verbal shape, we people
heaven and earth with laws and principles, and reduce government
and polity and social life to linguistic dimensions. In this we have
not only banished emotion and action from the inanimate world,
but we are fast banishing them from human life. Science and
scientific methods operating through language will soon make short
work with mental action, and reduce psychological experiences to
the same abstract generalisations as those to which the external world
is already reduced. This of course may be a tyranny which some
think founded on reason. I have no intention of discussing the
question, whether the ancient or modern tendency is more astray
from reality ; the facte of the case are all that I am at present con-
cerned about. They clearly show that the forces moulding ancient
forms of thought and belief are still the same and as potent as ever,
although they are changed in external aspect in so far as they are
modified by the dominance of abstract thought instead of imagination.
That which has routed all the genii from the world, all the satyrs
from the woods, and the naiads from the groves, which has over-
thrown the ancient gods from their Olympian throne, represented the
thunder of Zeus on the meteorological table, and converted the rage of
Poseidon into a tidal change, may well be considered to have largely
influenced the formation as well as reformation of these representa-
tions. The philologists, accordingly, have a reasonable presumption
in their favour, in their treatment of mythology ; and the voice of

10 REASON AND REVELATION.

adverse criticism that has been raised against them is, in many
respects, as inconsiderate and uncritical as the lond greeting that
hailed their first efforts. The method pursued by them is inductive,
however imperfectly it is sometimes carried ont ; and it may be said
of their science that no branch of inquiry begun since the active
manifestation of the inductive method ever gave promise of exhibit-
ing more triumphantly the fruitfulness of that principle than this
very division of study. It has partly done, and will continue to do,
for the past history of our race what geology has accomplished for
the prehistoric period of our planet. Where this early life was dead
and embalmed, philology has entered and with its touch awakened
the extinct consciousness that lay in names and vocables ; which,
fossil like, were left by the various ethnic waves in the strata of
history. These inquiries have also been helpful in introducing a
better and more philosophical Bpirit into discussions such as the
present. It is partly owing to them that the same impatience as for-
merly, in the contemplation of ethnic religions, is not now manifested.
Calm investigation has taken the place of hasty assertion ; a wide
observation is felt to be here, as elsewhere, the only mode of arriving
at sound and accurate conclusions.

Philologists, however, have some what over-estimated the influence
of language upon mythology and religions belief. Some of them
maintain, for instance, that in consequence of the early form of
language the powers of nature and natural objects generally had a
masculine or feminine gender attached to them ; that the words then
employed had thus a living power in them, and had not attained the
position of mere symbolic marks, such as they have at the present
day ; that, on the contrary, they called up to the minds of the
speakers or hearers the active operations of a natva-a. Nouns, it is
held accordingly, were not as at present merely expressive of quali-
ties, but were individual names. Verbs even had an actual sub-
stantial meaning, and, in this manner, everything was necessarily re-
presented as alive and breathing. These primitive men consequently
thought of sensible things as individuals, and by this necessary form-'
ation of language ascribed acts to things in themselves incapable
of action. From this arose the poetical conception of nature, and
an allegorical representation of its processes. Ordinary appearanoes,
whioh we state either in a symbolic form or in abstract terms, were
then stated and conceived in expressions denominative of life. Like
all young powers, it is further explained, the faculty of abstraction
was feeble, and the qualities of objects were not originally cognisable

K08MICA.L REVELATION. 11

by men, apart and distinct from the objects in themselves considered.
Nor were acts realised as severed from a being who performed
them. In the language of the mythologists of this school, the men
of the period now under discussion spake not of the sunrise but
conceived the sun as loving and embracing the dawn, and spake
accordingly; and the conclusion, of course, is that mythology is
regarded as the result, primarily at least, of a transition state of
language. The exaggeration here lies mainly in the position as-
signed to language in the phase of thought known as mythological.
I am very muoh inclined to doubt whether objects were at first
considered masculine or feminine because of the early form of lan-
guage, and rather think that it was the other way : the idea of
life in nature is not at first the reflection of language, but the reflec-
tion of internal personal experience. Children have notions of every
object around them, quite as animated as those of early peoples ;
and this manner of thought by no means arises from the existing
forms of language, but from a limited range of vision which is con-
fined as yet very much to a personal world. Set a child with its
toys, or doll, or any other wooden and lifeless thing, and it will
carry on a brisk conversation with its plaything, beat it, caress
it, and exhibit all the signs of intercourse customary with a living
being. It does not distinguish between animate and inanimate,
not so much because of the necessities of speech, but because of
defective observation and undeveloped powers of discrimination. A
good model of an animal will please or terrify children as much as
the reality.

The nearest approach, perhaps, that an intelligent man now makes
to such a primitive state of mind is the readiness with which, on a
solitary road and in a glimmering light, he personifies natural objects
that may assume to his imagination the most remote likeness to
known living things, and assigns to them all the actions correspond-
ing to his temporary impressions. Language, with the child and
primitive man, follows mental conception in the first place ; and its
forms of masculine and feminine used indiscriminately for all visible
existences are the result of two forces : first, of the idea of life in
these two forms gained from experience of one's own personality
and that of other living beings ; and secondly, of the confusion of
this idea with ideas that arise from our experience of a different
order of existences which affect the early consciousness in a manner
analogous to those general characteristic impressions produced by
the sexes. If conscious action and personality were extended to

J2

REASON AND REVELATION.

what was unconscious and impersonal, from an apparent resem-
blance in external manifestation, it is only a continuation of the
same process when the names for the most general distinctions
noted in the first order of existence are applied to like distinctions
noted in the second. In onr abstract phraseology we do the same
thing at present when we apply feminine or masculine attributes, and
phrases expressive of action, to vegetable growth. I am glad on this
point to support myself by a remark made by Mr. E. B. Tylor. He
considers that these distinctions of gender, when once the idea of life
in external nature is formed in the mind, may be owing to the effect
that certain phenomena may have upon the sensibility as strong
or weak, and quotes the remarks of the dyaks of Borneo, who say
of a downpour of rain, " A he rain this ! " Mental impressions
would thus give birth to word forms, and, as I have shown before,
these word forms would react on future mental impressions. The
two agencies would then combine to shape the more elaborate
mythologies, as they have always combined in all human specula-
tions. The myth would thus be originally the offspring of human
conception, and secondarily only of word forms. The contribution
to mythology by language, although thus secondary in chronological
order, may be by no means secondary in actual importance, and is,
in any case, indispensable in our investigations, as a reliable witness
where no other testimony is available. Grammatical forms, classi-
fying as they originally did animals, vegetables, and minerals, as
masculine and feminine, are records to us of man's first opinions
and impressions of nature, and give .us an insight into early philo-
sophical speculations. The body of this primitive philosophy is lost
in so far as we have no detailed treatise of the ideas prevalent at
that time regarding physical, moral, or social life, but we have in
language and in myth the successive stages of this humanistic
past.

We should err very much by introducing new principles to account
for these early developments of human experience. <The great laws
that form life and thought now formed them long ago. Modern
geologists find that rock formations, with their varied phenomena of
upheaval, waste, and fracture are best explained by the principles
that explain geological action taking place under our eyes. The
supposition of unknown agencies is found to be not only unnecessary
but absolutely false. The facts to be explained and the explanations
of these facts, whether they lie deep down in the Cambrian period,
or above in the historic, have only time as an element of distinction,

KOSMICAL REVELATION. 13

and this is a matter of no consequence nnless as a mark of arrange-
ment. It is the same with mythology. It embodies the natural,
moral, and social speculations of mankind. It is the science of the
past, and its poetry, in short, the general outcome of human thought
upon the experiences of life observed by the human mind. The
family likeness in all these mythologies, with the same broad features
repeated in widely different parts of the earth, tempting casual
observers to explain them by a descent from a primeval revelation
imparted to the common father of the many peoples of these differ-
ent lands, shows how natural was this exercise of mind, and explains
the universality of the method pursued. The local dissimilarities
that we encounter are entirely superficial, and caused by local
varieties of experience. The phenomena in nature out of which
myths grew in different places would at first be those that were
most striking to the dwellers in these regions ; and the mythic ac-
cretion, with much in it that was common, as sunlight and its effects,
would have here and there diversities answering, for instance, to
the various configurations on the surface of the globe, and to the
different nationalities or tribal peculiarities. We shall be disap-
pointed if we expect to find a series of sciences in any mythology,
or in all combined, although we may look with some hope of success
for germs of what have since become sciences. This will be par-
ticularly the case with classes of facts too patent to pass unobserved
even in early times, being either unusually terrible or pleasing or
useful in their effects upon man. For this is actually the beginning
of every science. It commences at the point where its contents
obviously touch mankind, where the occurrences whose order it
seeks to formulate have a plain connection with individual or social
well being. Geological changes, such as submersion, elevation, and
eruption, atmospheric and celestial phenomena, such as variation in
the weather, and stellar motion, lie at the basis of many myths, some
of which are classic and universal, and others merely local, according
to the wide or narrow action of the agencies mythicised. A good
illustration of what I mean may be found in the New Zealand myth
of Bangi and Papa, who were cloven asunder by Tane-Mahata,
father of forests. Then there seems to be the germ of the modern
or Huttonian theory of geological waste stated most exactly in the
mythic record that the beings of ancient days (and of modern days
too) who submerged land were a terrible race, and one long con-
tinued, whose progeny were Mist, and Heavy-dew, and Light-dew.
These beings are said to have carried on operations, and by their

14 SEASON AND REVELATION.

labours to have left very little of the dry land standing above the
water. If we strip off the personifications in this and similar
accounts, we have enumerated, with exceptions peculiar to the
climate, the agencies generally classified by the geologist under
atmospheric waste.

The Maori must have been at an early time advanced geologists,
more advanced than medieval speculators in this modern science.
It is impossible to doubt that other natural events were as success-
fully observed and chronicled, and have only become obscure or
entirely meaningless to us, by reason of the different point of view
from which they and we regard and represent them. Much of what
is apparently scientific or quasi-scientific in the Bible we may after-
wards find to be of a mythic nature ; some of these myths being
recorded in narrative form, and others as illustrations of truths.
Many of them in external appearance can be paralleled in almost
every mythological system, although there are important spiritual
distinctions in their conception. No one can pretend that the accounts
of the creation of the world and of man by the Hebrews, as quasi-
scientific statements merely, are superior to others that might be
mentioned, but there is, besides this, a spiritual and Divine element,
or, as some call it, a religious-ethical truth, in the Bible record *
that is not to be found in other cosmogonies. These latter are as
a rule purely mythico-scientific statements.

Divination, which was practised in very early times, is a nearer ap-
proach to the modern conception of science. In order to prosecute
this art with success, many branches of it required a greater atten-
tion to the aspects of natural phenomena than we can find any trace
of in the half allegorical attitude of the mythic stage. The ful-
gators, for example, must, as has been observed, distinguish the
direction of the lightning, and a knowledge of rock formation and
stratification would be necessary for the sinking of wells. The pro-
phetic announcements and hopes that we find in many mytho-
logies are only the result of cosmical observation originally, with a
later colouring from moral relations. The prophecy of the Voluspa
is one of the finest of this class.

• There seems little reason to doubt that this is a hymn on creation, written
when the religious consciousness of the Jews had reached a very high point of
development. It is quite possible that what we now possess was based upon
some older and cruder and more mythical forms. In fact, this is probably the
case.

K09MICAL REVELATION. 15

«« Lo she beholds the earth onoe more emerge
From oat the waters, and grow green again.
The floods subside, the eagle flies abroad,
And seeks his fishy pasture from the rooks,
The gods shall meet again on Ida's field,
And speak of him who clasps the world around,
And of the mighty god's most ancient runes."

The moral life framed in this beautiful mythic setting follows.

" She sees a hall shine brighter than the sun,
Covered with gold, upon fair GimiTs heights.
There virtuous nations shall for ever dwell
Through the long ages filled with happiness."

The effects of polynomyny, as it has been called, or the use of
several terms in describing the attributes of one object, and the occa-
sional necessary interchange of these terms to denote several objects
agreeing in some particulars, are certain to have been very consider-
able. It is very easy to magnify these results, as Mr. Cox has done,
sometimes by too much fancifolness, or by a one-sided conception of
the growth of human thought ; and it is equally easy, as Mr. Baring-
Gould has occasionally done, to apply this exaggerated representation
of a partial explanation of historical phenomena in such a manner as
would discountenance even recent authentic historic facts. Mr. Cox
and those who think with him may be pardoned the extreme statement
of their portion of the truth. The way to counteract their unqualified
theory is by supplying those portions, or at least some of those
portions, that have been overlooked by them. It has been well said
that to isolate a particular event in political causation and demand
its consequences is an imaginary thing, and exists only in our
thoughts ; that no event occurs thus in vacuo. In like manner, to
account for a particular development of human thought and life by a
single cause, however powerfully operative that may be, is not to
reason upon the real but upon what is entirely unreal. Where the
result is complex, and the sphere of life, in*which the facts to be ex-
plained occur involved, single forces ought never to be looked for.
The antecedents will ever be as multiform as the relations, and will
modify each other at every step in the process. And in endeavouring
to give a rational account of ancient mental life as presented to us in
mythology, any one theory must be held along with many others
expressed or implied. Polynomyny, if more carefully and reverently
pursued, will certainly assist in guiding us to the explanation of the
growth of mythology. If mythology is, as we think it appears on
closer investigation to be, a stage in the progress of thought, we

16 REASON AND REVELATION.

most consider this advancement in relation to the instrument of
thought. But we must repeat the principle that we laid down at the
outset of this chapter, when speaking of the relation of language and
its forms to the personal conception of nature, that polynomyny must
be subordinate to mental conception, in the production of what are
called secondary myths, even as verbal form was subordinate to the
mental idea which generated primary myths. These secondary myths
are in reality ordinary natural experiences, with a few personifica-
tions dropped, or these personifications generalised over a series of re-
lated phenomena. This could not possibly take place without a great
modification in the language, and this linguistic change would, in
turn, give an impetus to the more general view of life and the more
precise conclusions formulated in these early days, as specific deities
operating in special regions. There is a larger comparison, and
a more minute observation of nature, in these secondary myths ;
but we are still in the personal, half poetic, era of thought ;
they stand to us as representative of a transitional state in this
peculiar mode of man's relation to the external world. They are an
onward step in science, about which religious instincts by and by
played in such a manner as to conceal in some measure the original
meanings to the consciousness of succeeding times, and not purely
theological generalisations. These movements, we shall afterwards see,
reached generalisations of greater comprehensiveness when the order
of the gods culminated in one who was supreme in this kosmical
hierarchy.

It requires an effort for men living in the present day vividly to
conceive such a condition of things. It is only to be realised by such
a clear perception of the early consciousness as comparative mytho-
logy and ethnic religions, along with the psychological manifest-
ations of childhood, may in some measure help us to acquire. Nor
must a careful consideration of the process of thought-building,
through the medium of language, be neglected. The gradual
development of the generation of the gods, in which form the early
researches and common experiences of men were generally embodied,
helps to show us the light that actually came from nature to the
human spirit when men first faced it wistfully. It differs, I am
convinced, from the light that comes at the present day through
science from the same source, only by being concretely represented
in the first form and more or less abstractly in the second, and, in
addition to this, by the tendency, natural in earlier times, to what
I have called indeterminateness and confusion of the personal with

KOSMICAL REVELATION. 17

the impersonal, which is part of the result of concrete represen-
tation.

This explanation is not to be confounded with what has been
called Comte's law. It is as distinct from this law as it is from
the theory that would explain early history by the supposition that
Divine knowledge was actually perceived through observation of
nature. The same thing may be said of Comte's law that has been
said of the philological laws, that it is much too precise and definite
and one sided, to be natural, and, in fact, has history and scientific
development against it. Nowhere in the whole course of the growth
of science, from its earliest form, in the shape of mere practical
knowledge, do we, as has been observed, and as the natural exercise
of mental life will teach, find indications of the three different
methods of investigating nature mentioned by Comte. There could
have been no natural dependence of the various stages in the
evolution of science, on Comte's supposition. We cannot find the
transition between the theological and metaphysical, nor between
the metaphysical and positive ; and as little can we see how the
transition could be made from the one to the other, and the results
be carried forward, if the methods were so much opposed as they
have been represented. Indeed, all the stages which Comte dis-
tinguishes and differentiates as various methods are found histori-
cally co-existing. The view here taken is that which appears agree-
able to the facts presented for explanation, and in harmony with
the natural course of thought, and the known growth of science,
viz., that there has been one method of investigating nature, which,
as might have been anticipated, was variously successful according
to the experiences of men in different ages, but which in principle
was essentially the same at all times. The law of Comte can only
be accepted as a compact manner of stating the narrower and wider
generalisations, given in more or less concrete and personal repre-
sentations of natural occurrences presented to the sense experience
of man, in proportion as groups of these experiences became assimi-
lated by associative experience under a more embracing explanation.

CHAPTER III.

ANCIENT AND MODERN THEISM.

44 The world by wisdom knew not God."

The sphere of the visible world, which has been constantly embracing
man and which has formed his conscious experience in all ages, may
be called a revelation, if we so please ; bat it is not a revelation in the
sense in whioh that term is usually employed. Revelation, as com-
monly understood, is the mode of communicating a form of truth
whioh cannot, it is supposed, be learned from the external world. The
revelations sometimes spoken of as having been received through
nature, more nearly resemble incipient forms of science, deified, as we
now say. But it may be asked, how did these forms of truth first
become deified P And here we meet with that constantly recurring
obstacle in our researches of past life and thought — the difficulty of
reading the conceptions of former times through language. The
words expressive of the prof oundest truths in religion, like the words
employed for the ordinary experiences of life, gain or lose in con-
notation, or both gain and lose by the lapse of time. In asking a
question like the one now proposed, we are not to be held bound to
account for all that is included in the modern conception of deity.
If we carefully construe to ourselves the import of this idea, as it
was understood by man in the mythological period of which I have
spoken, we shall see that this conception, which is to us one of ex-
ceeding complexity, was in the mythological stage one of great
simplicity. Worship, which has been always connected with this
idea as the external expression of the internal thought or feeling,
may have been, whether in fetish or idol worship, a mere supersti-
tious growth upon a very simple and innocent practice. From what
we know of the habits of savage tribes, these objects or figures seem
to be regarded as symbolical representations of kosmical conception,
or as the temporary habitation of the spirit or life or power of some
natural force ; kosmical conception being, as we have seen, in this
less abstract age, necessarily regarded as personal. From this personal
view of nature men soon came to consider it as cruel or kind in its
action towards them, and this gave rise to the widespread dualism

ANCIENT AND MODERN THEISM. 19

in worship ; a dualism whose fundamental idea was purely kosmical
to begin with, and into which other relations, such as moral and
spiritual, may have entered at a mnch later period. We have still
this kosmical starting point preserved in the expressions we use,
with altered meanings, for spiritual and moral goodness and evil ;
these are traceable to sensible ideas — they bear upon them the marks
of their physical origin.

The attitude assumed by men towards these personified physical
forces, was naturally and by degrees, one of worship, dictated partly
by fear and partly by affection. But the practice of sometimes
punishing these artificial objects by whipping, pricking, and even
banishing them for faithlessness to their promises, or by throwing
them in the mud in fits of disappointment, shows that worship had
not all at once attained persistence, and that the reverence was
hardly what we mean by Divine, but rather a fluctuating personal
regard. It does not accord with the feelings that have place in
veneration, to consider the figures that are thus defaced and repaired
as anything more than a kind of charm, which by long habit, and
more or less constant association, have gained a tolerably consistent
regard and respect, broken by temporary fits of dislike.

These primitive minds undoubtedly imagine their fetish charm, as
they imagine everything else, to be tenanted by a personal being ;
the reflection, as we have seen, of their own inner feelings. We
fail very much through modern civilisation to enter into the spirit
that distinguishes this early cultus, and to understand its monitions
from the material world. We require to be constantly on our
guard against judging this age of the childhood of man exactly by
our self-conscious life, and applying our present theories, without
modification, to its distinctive manifestations. Dreams have been
supposed to account for this phase of human thought and feeling,
and very likely they did operate in strengthening other impressions.
The impressions, however, are first made in waking moments. We
have yet amid the grander and stiller forms of nature a vague sense
of intangibility, immateriality, — of what we now sometimes call
sanctity, — of something "far more deeply interfused," and which no
amount of scientific observation or nice and accurate discrimination of
sensible phenomena can gainsay or affirm. We are fast receding, it
is true, from this living recognition of nature ; we have little room
in our modern scientific work for undefined old-world imaginings
such as these ; analysis, tangible and visible investigation, banish all
this inborn sense of that which appears to be neither tangible nor

c 2

20 SEASON AND REVELATION.

visible, as not coming within the range of oar method of cognising
things. Our nearest approach to this is the middle ground between
the extremes of former and present times, occupied by poetry, in so
far as this is the resignation of the spirit or mind in sensitivity, to
the united impression of the r6 nav — to what appears to one in this
attitude of mind to be the realised presence of a spirit in the uni-
verse, resulting from the conjoined action of the great immensity of
being, which crushes necessarily the individual and isolated faculty
of perception, and for a time leaves no place for analysis and par-
ticular observation, but bears in npon the mind a sense of person-
ality commensurate with the vastness; and thus imparts to the
whole sum of things such a nnity, and life in this unity, as no
minute investigation of causes can comprehend. It was something
resembling this impression that the primitive man felt in the solitudes
of nature ; and there is nothing to wonder at in the apparent
spiritual, or rather superhuman element which appeared to him
to be present in it, both in the whole, and in its parts. We do
not now, unless in artificial and rhetorical language, speak of the
spirit of a wood or the genius of a place, although there was un-
questionably a time when men honestly spoke of such things. We
would not now talk, far less pray, to a stone or a piece of wood ;
but who, even in what we now call our higher culture, is not some-
times filled with awe before an imposing natural spectacle, or lifted
out of himself, as we say, by the dread silences of nature, her calms,
her terrible beauty, — and forced to let the pagan soul within him
speak and worship ? The deification of natural objects, as it is
called, may thus be, partially at least, explained on the mythico-
scientific hypothesis. It would then be a result of the perception of
nature peculiar to a stage in mental development. Half-awakened
spiritual instincts no doubt might, under this form, be unconsciously
aspiring to objects that could alone satisfy them ; but the pure form
of the Divine and spiritual God, as we conceive God, was not
revealed to them in the way I have described.

Physical order even, which in our times has been much relied on
by a certain class of minds, for communications of a spiritual nature,
or for proofs thereof, has been lately felt to be a very doubtful
means of arriving at spiritual facts. As a proof, it is at best one
after the fact, and not the source or one of the sources of the
evidence. All the intercourse that exists between man and the
outer world in the first instance, and apart from an illuminated
spiritual life, and those occasional vague feelings which I have

ANCTKNT AND MODEEN THEISM. 21

described, is a sense-given experience: the idea of God has no
place in it ; and, as a consequence, has no place in pnre science. It
is very probable, as we shall afterwards learn, that the visible
creation and the revelation of the invisible bear an analogy to each
other; bat instead of going through kosmical order to spiritual
intelligence, the proper course for us is to pass from spiritual
intelligence to kosmical order. It is true that tbe world-creation is
a necessary prelude, just as we shall find other things presupposed
in any given revelation. As we are constituted, some platform is
needed on which to operate. But those who have the invisible
historic creation of the spiritual world need never attempt to
construct the same from the material which external nature alone
supplies. If they do, they will introduce into their argument much
that is irrelevant. For if they do not introduce this irrelevant
matter, how comes it that they get so much more out of their argu-
ment than was formerly obtained ? If modern theism, for instance,
is purer and higher, is it not by some equivocation in the terms ?
Theism, as held by many at present, is no longer purely so, bat is
mingled with Christian conceptions. Unmixed theism of the nine-
teenth century would neither be more nor less than a wide general-
isation of the kosmical revelation of the early mind ; and when
closely interrogated, and stripped of that which does Dot properly
belong to it, we shall find the same fundamental characteristics
distinguishing both. The idea of law, and the conception of design,
cannot of themselves give us the idea of a Divine Will working
behind all phenomena. The ancient mind did not really rise above
a material or indefinite efficient antecedent more or less personified,
and the modern view, apart from revelation, is at its root the very
same. We have not even lost the personification entirely. The
idea of cause, which is such a stumbling-block in science and
philosophy, is a remnant of this personality formerly seen in
nature — a projection of internal experiences into external pheno-
mena analogically resembling these experiences. The arguments
often urged in support of the idea of causation are in fact derived
from the feelings of intelligent life ; the argument for design is no less
drawn from the- same sphere of life. These two fundamental posi-
tions of the theist are thus in spirit, and in a great measure in form
and substance, equivalent to the views of a rude state of civilisation.
On more minute consideration it will be found that we have not
altogether severed ourselves from our antecedents. Were psycholo-
gists in their analysis of the idea of cause, to inquire into the origin

22 REASON AND REVELATION.

and history of the conception in the early stage of thought noticed
in the last chapter, they would find that it is largely a survival
of the mode of representation of external facts prevalent among
children and savages — the transference of the personal experiences
of volitional and intelligent life to objects that have neither. The
answer that is sometimes given to this is in reality no answer at all.
It has been said, for example, by Sir William Hamilton to be
refuted by the consideration that between the overt act of corporeal
movement, of which we are cognisant, and the internal act of mental
determination, of which we are also cognisant, there intervene a
numerous series of intermediate agencies, of which we have no
knowledge, and, consequently, that we can have no consciousness of
any causal connection between the extreme links of this chain — the
volition to move and the limb moving. As a reply to a particular
philosophical theory of causation this may be accepted as sufficient ;
but it misses the main point in regard to the conception of cause in
itself considered. In the first place, it is an application of the
observations of a matured consciousness to the infancy of mental
experience. Hundreds of conceptions vulgarly believed, and ori-
ginating in a rude state of life and society, have been dissipated
as opposed to facts well observed ; but these unanswerable conclu-
sions of exact science do not in the least affect the conceptions as
psychological phenomena to be accounted for : the mental law that
produced the belief, is a separate matter from the belief itself,
as correct or incorrect to fact. Nor is it only wrong as being the
application of experience in one phase of society, to test experience
in another, and very different phase ; it is, in the second place, erron-
eousas a theory. If, as the objector urges, the two factors of which
we are alone conscious, be the first and last numbers of a series,
whose intermediate links, however numerous, are entirely without
our knowledge, would not, beyond question, a connection be estab-
lished in the mind between these conscious links, volition and bodily
movements ? If we are not conscious of the mediated motions of
nerves and muscles, and if, as was the case, observation had not
discovered these intervening motions, the uncritical mind would
inevitably form its conception of changes effected by itself, without
consideration of the intervening causes and effects actually operative,
but unfelt and unknown. This was really done, and is yet done, by
untutored minds. The primitive theory of causation was complete
when the explanation of change, where persons were concerned, was
extended to ordinary events without apparent personality, which I

ANCIENT AND MODERN THEISM. 23

hare already had occasion to notice as peculiar to all early efforts
to account for occurrences various, indeed, in character, but which
were united by the common external resemblance of change.

Notwithstanding the evident genesis of this notion, it is held by
some metaphysicians to be given in thought ; but the idea of causa-
tion given in the thought of the metaphysician, if he will investigate
it, instead of starting with the assumption that it is simple, known
not as a corollary, but as a postulate of phenomena, will be found
to be the abstract form of the concrete representation of an earlier
stage of thought. The stationariness of the idea of cause is some-
times put forward as proof of the fact of its being given in thought.
But this stationariness of the conception, if historically considered,
will be seen to be not so much in the idea of causation as in the
mere word. The expression has stood as a symbol employed in
very different epochs of scientific development, but symbolising very
different things at different times. It first formulated the volitional
theory of the relation of external phenomena ; it was then carried up
into the larger generalisation of the metaphysical theory, and by a
limitation of its signification is now retained as a useful expression
in the scientific theory, or, as some prefer to call it, the positive
theory. The idea of cause, like the actual globe on which we live,
while to all appearance fixed, has been constantly changing, as a
general glance at modern thought might alone lead one to believe.
Although the theist has raised his object of worship as he himself
has risen in scientific attainments, his conception of what he oalls the
Deity derived from nature alone, is still a God of might and power
like that of the ancients. For a Deity with more or less sublimated
physical strength, the theist of our time has substituted one whose
characteristic is more nearly that of a supreme intellectual power.
The ground idea is still the embodiment of what, at each period, is
considered the highest power, and has a generalisation proportioned
to the range of the prevalent inductive faculty. The name of this
Being is the same in both cases, the Omnipotent j men's notions
of what is omnipotent alone being changed more and more from
the physical to the intellectual. The God of wisdom, which our
theists have enthroned, is simply the expression of the characteristic
of present mental tendencies, as the Deity of earlier times was the
expression of the tendency of primitive life. Our theism may be
much more determinate and distinct from pure scientific thought
than that of the indeterminate period of earlier times, but the
starting point is the same.

24 REASON AND REVELATION.

This starting point is in the phenomena of the external world in
relation to man. Both ancients and moderns are observers of
natnre, the moderns more than the ancients. From experiences
arising ont of the multiform objects aronnd them both have drawn
their notion of deity in the pare theistic sense ; bnt modern culture
has given a greater degree of consistency to the theistic idea. It
has lifted it out of a concrete humanistic form into that of an
abstract intellectual one. This has been merely the Tesult of our
changed attitude towards the phenomena presented to us. This
higher abstraction has reacted on the original desire to investigate
and explain the causes and concurrences of events, and has led to
yet higher abstractions. We have the fullest manifestation of this
type of mind in the intellectual life of the present day, as it faces
the vast number of interesting phenomena that everywhere meet it,
and endeavours to bring them under a comprehensive law. It is
under this impulse that astronomers at once embrace fuller particu-
lars and reduce them to their ultimate explanatory laws; that
geologists pursue their patient researches, and enrich the common
stock of truth out of the records of unknown ages, stored away in
the great register kept in the bosom of the earth and written by the
unerring hand of nature. It is in obedience to the same modern
spirit that inquirers in the social or individual phase of human life
seek to know all that can be known, and to bring this under the
widest generalisation.

The highest generalisation in any of the branches of inquiry or in
all combined is no more than a generalisation of science. It is a mis-
take of theists to say, as they sometimes have said, that this gener-
alisation, whether they translate it into a creative might, a supreme
mechanist, an intellectual, volitional, or other force, is God. It is
purely an ordinary abstraction of science, that a certain kind of
reverent mythico-scientific mind projects from the works of nature,
to keep the machine in operation and to satisfy a craving to worship
something. Some of these generalisations, it is true, give us awful
conceptions of power, of endless ages in which this enduring force
manifested itself ; but when we know these and kindred notions, we
have not come nearer the strict knowledge of God. Mr. Martineau,
in some remarks on Comte, exhibits the tendency I am speaking
of, very markedly. He is arguing against Comte's objection to the
supposition of final causes, on the ground that phenomena can be
accounted for by mechanical laws, and remarks that physical force
does not exclude volition. Mr. Martineau formulates the problem

ANCIENT AND MODERN THEISM. 25

in celestial physics as follows, — if a fixed impulse be given and
mutual attraction constantly present, the motions observed in our
system would follow. So, however, they would, he concludes, if
willed by omnipotent Intelligence. The only difference, he holds,
between these representations being, that the composition of forces
is a mere artificial device, treating as plural a spring of motion, which,
like our own volition to a given muscular action, is really simple ;
the plurality is, therefore, no real plurality, but a contrivance for
getting phenomena under the dominion of the calculus. He main-
tains accordingly, that, if there be complexity, it is only in the mode
of execution, and not in origination. Thus the composite doctrine,
he remarks, shows its fictitious character where volitional origination
is an indisputable fact. If real, he repeats, it is only executively
so ; and an instrumental medium of the Divine will. Hypothetical
conception of the Newtonian forces, does not, he thinks, exclude
primary causation of the Divine will.

One is startled, even in metaphysical thinking, where one perhaps
should make up one's mind never to be startled at anything, at
finding such decided marks of the origin of our conceptions of
natural phenomena in the personal epoch of thought, in the state-
ment that " the composition of forces is a device treating as plural
a spring of motion like our volition." But this is less astonishing
than to find Sir John Herschel accrediting a similar representation.
Arguing, in an article on Humboldt's Kosmos, against the idea of
the frame of nature being a piece of mechanism, he says, " but will
admitted into any part of such a system destroys the whole of it.
The blind, unintelligent portions of the mechanism must be invested
with the power of conforming themselves to that will, as to the
original impulse which set the whole in motion ; and how are we
then to distinguish between these evolutions, which result from a will
of which we are conscious, and those, which, for aught we know,
may be continually resulting from a will continually in action,
though concealed from our knowledge and perception ? "

It is plainly possible in this arbitrary fashion to admit any quali-
fying influence into any part of such a system as that of nature, and
imaginatively to destroy the whole of it. It is not a question of
admissions, but notoriously one of experiences. If this will, there-
fore, be admitted into the system, although acting without our
knowledge and perception, and that, even by those who for the sake
of their argument thus admit it in a probable way only, it is simply
an illustration of the tenacity with which pervading sentiments and

26 REASON AND REVELATION.

opinions cling to mankind, and are handed down to succeeding
times as unquestionable truths, apart altogether from their cor-
rectness or incorrectness. Neither Sir John Herschel nor Mr.
Martineau .can, with any propriety, be said, in such statements as I
have given, to be speaking from their own experiences of nature.
When Mr. Martineau can put his finger upon the one "spring of
motion like our volition," it will be time to think of giving up the
device of treating this as a composition of forces. Until then, I
suspect that those against whom Mr. Martineau argues will re-
taliate by saying, that his idea of a spring of motion like our
volition is a metaphysical device treating, as singular, forces that
according to all experience are compound. The application, without
apparent limitation, of the analogies of personal and volitional life
to the external world and its phenomena so plain in the theistic
argument of Mr. Martineau renders it less valuable than it other-
wise would have been. We are made to feel that the physicist at
least keeps to his actual experiences, and that the theist is drawing
largely on his imagination. At one time, for example, we are told
that the composition of forces, in the illustration given above, is
simply a convenient form of stating what is uncompounded ; and in
the next clause, that if this be complexity, which it seems is after
all most likely, this complexity is in execution not in origination.
But no natural philosopher in the present day ever affects, so far as
I am aware, to take cognisance of anything else than sensible phe-
nomena ; and until the originating primal motion is evidenced to his
perceptions like these so-called instrumental media, he has some rea-
son to consider this wide leap from many forces to one to be but a
quasi-simplioity, and a mere artificial device for getting phenomena
under the dominion of the theistic conception. This mode of progress-
ing to unity is wholly unsupported by the facts of experience. We
see many causes converging into fewer, and it may really be, that the
many do not exclude the one ; only the complete convergence from
the kosmical side must at present be the mere effort of imagination
— an effort quite as likely as otherwise to be as untrue to fact, as was
the early exercise of imagination on scientific observation. It is not
in this way that the spiritual — the Divine in any Bhape, can be made
known or even proved to man. This is not what the most correct ob-
servers draw from the surrounding world. If the correlation of forces
were proved beyond all doubt, even into the region of mental life
and one force capable of being postulated in science, it would be no
fair corollary from such a result to say that this force was Divine.

ANCIENT AND MODEBN THEISM.

Sir John Herschel, in the article already mentioned, thinks
differently. He says that the mind, in the contemplation of laws
operating as causes, is " led back in the chain of causation through
the phenomena of organised life, to powers of a higher order, which
connecting themselves with the idea of will, involves the conception
of intelligence, from which we are necessarily led to infer design,
and from design find ourselves forced on the conclusion of motive ; "
and he says further, " it is thus, and thus only, that the contem-
plation of nature can be said to lead us up by legitimate induction
to its Author." There is in this statement an erroneous conception
of the psychological origin of the idea of causation. He thinks that
it is gained in our experiences in organised life, is thereafter con-
nected with the idea of will and intelligence, and so on ; when on the
contrary, as I have already had occasion to point out more in
detail, it is the result of our volitional experiences and those of
others projected into an impersonal sphere. This erroneous con-
ception leads him again into an exaggerated opposition towards
what he designates positive philosophy. He holds as against this
philosophy, which he says repudiates causation, and with it all that
may be called explanation of natural phenomenon, that in physics,
at least, the inquiry into causes is philosophy, and that nothing else
is so; and gives as an illustration the reference to force as a cause of
planetary motions, which he considers more than a mere generalisa-
tion of law. But the conception of force in planetary motion is, like
the same conception in terrestrial motion, the mere antecedent of a
consequent, and has not, to the scientific mind, a relation to the
cause of primitive times. This is in reality afterwards expressed
by the same writer in language to which no positive philosopher
would object : "the craving of the philosophic mind is for explana-
tion; that is, for the breaking up of complex phenomena into familiar
sequences."

It should also be noticed that the theist introduces into his
induction through an imaginary chain of causation, whose con-
tinuity is unbroken, truth from another sphere. But to confound
in this manner different spheres of experience, is, at the present
stage of thought at least, bad philosophy. The theistic reasoning
referred to proceeds upon the unsupported hypothesis that all truth
can be attained in one line of investigation. It is an effort, pre-
maturely made, to bridge the chasm between scientific truth, as it
is called, and purely spiritual truth. It inspires doubt to hear men
argue from ascertained laws to a Person in whom they all, not may

28 EEASON AND REVELATION.

find, bat must find their highest explanation. A work too, we are
often told, by those who in the same school vary the argument,
implies a workman ; a plan speaks of a designer ; a law implies a
lawgiver ; causation is only explicable by will ; and the only really
efficient cause of which we can form any conception is the Divine
will. Putting aside altogether the general objection that might be
urged against such reasoning as this, that it is simply arguing from
abstract words, we ought to consider whether our notion of an
artificer exalts our idea of God ; whether that of a designer really
elevates him to the extent that is often imagined by those who thus
represent Him ; or whether, in short, these notions correspond to
the phenomena they are meant to explain. It is almost demon-
strable that this is not the way from a scientific point of view,
which is the view of those who argue as above described, of
exhibiting God's work in nature, as they term it. It is at best only
some men's way of looking at God's work in nature ; but their
way of looking at this work and God's way of accomplishing it may
likely enough be widely separated, if they be in any way related.

If modern science tends to show anything, and it is perhaps
premature to say positively that it does show anything regarding
the correct mode of conceiving the universe as a whole, it appears
to indicate that the idea of design, as generally explained, is
not a perfectly adequate idea. There is far less intention, humanly
speaking, in nature and history than is generally taken for granted
in the theory of design. Evolution or growth seems to come
nearer the reality than purpose. The explanation by design is very
often applied in a somewhat similar manner to works of human
genius, and not always with manifest aptness. Critics are now and
then explicit and full in their assertions of how Shakspeare, for
example, in certain positions and with given characters proceeded on
some supposed preconceived plan. Our great novelists are likewise
spoken of as having gone through the mental processes that a care-
ful and attentive reader thinks he perceives evident in the execution
of their works. Sculptors and painters may sometimes hear similar
principles of action assigned to them in the execution of the best
works of their chisel and pencil, and in many cases anything like
direct purpose and design is as far from being the guiding and
formative spirit of their works throughout as it is from being the
expression of the agency that moulds the clouds of heaven into
their marvellous shape, and steeps them in the most varied and
harmonious colourings. Moliere, I feel certain, only expressed the

ANCIENT AND MODERN THEISM. 20

bare truth, when he said of his " Misanthrope " that he scarcely
knew what he meant by his creation ; and the recent life of Dickens
is psychologically interesting, as showing the undesigned, and to
the author himself unexpected, turns in his work, as it grew under
his hands.

A town or a government appears to be, more than most things,
the result of direct foresight. It consorts well with the common no-
tion of design to regard them as pre-determined products of human
purpose, and the outcome of intelligent calculation and intention,
and yet the gradual and adhesive addition in the formation of each
of these institutions, if intimately traced, will be found to be a sim-
ple growth, fostered and developed by many influences beyond the
calculation of human intelligence. They are each the result of
forces that operate as unconsciously as those that are active in other
orders of life, where we unhesitatingly apply the terms growth and
development. In the case of a town now covering miles of ground,
a castle planted long ago might bring some religious establishment
to that corner of a country, and round this a little community would
grow up. Or in another case, a river flows lazily, like other rivers,
through some quiet meadow, and a village, accidentally formed on
one of its banks, grows through the attraction of life and the as-
similating and centralising power of trade, and becomes the metro-
polis of an empire, or of the world. And nature, studied in those
sciences which may be called historical is, like human history and
human institutions, an endless growth — an evolution whose first
germ contains not so much the stamp of design as the impress of
development. We do not need to lay stress again on the statement
already made when reviewing the idea of causation in regard to
the phenomena of the external world, that the idea of design applied
to these phenomena, like the idea of causation similarly applied,
arises from the introduction of a conception belonging to one sphere
of experience into that of another.

Your theistic worshippers, like their primitive ancestors, in spirit
at least, admire a watchmaker, and through his means they rise to
the grand conception of the universal Watchmaker, who made the
great world-chronometer, and winds it up, and keeps it going, and has
hung it in space that men might puzzle over it, and after a time of
anxious investigation and severe speculation rise from the work to
the Workman. Chemical compounds also speak to such a mind as
this of an almighty Chemist working in His great laboratory ; zoo-
logy represents Him engrossed with more details and in less dignified

30 REASON AND REVELATION.

circumstances : each division of the sciences is traced up to Him —
its 'patron and founder. But this intellectual abstraction which,
theism or science has helped to create for its supreme mental satis-
faction or adoration, and as the representative of its highest induc-
tion, is not God. The method, which the theist takes, of realising
this last result of knowledge is not the method, as we shall after-
wards point out, that the Revealer Himself of spiritual truth adopted
in His teaching. The principle is barren in its result, both as seen
in its own development and as witnessed in its practical influence
upon men around us, and upon those in former times already men-
tioned. The god thus postulated or attempted to be demonstrated
to our intellects is no object for universal worship and reverence, as
the true God must ever be. He is merely the metaphysical entity
of the quasi-scientific mind, and capable of reverence and adoration
only by such a mind. A god like this can no more be supposed to
exist as a personality than the law of gravity for example can be
supposed to exist as such. For what is he really P Is he not an
attempted explanation of that and other laws, an arbitrary unifica-
tion of multiform forces P Is he not the outcome of a futile exercise
of our mental power endeavouring, not only to explain the modes of
action of the different objects that meet us everywhere, but to ex-
plain the higher modes of action, or the highest law which includes
them all P This is, in itself, an excusable effort, and in its proper way
it may yet be crowned with success ; at least, it is the goal to which
all generalisations are moving : the acceptance, however, of the result
of this effort as a being fit for Divine honours, is not so excusable.
This last result can be no other than the ultimate law. If it be an
induction from nature, and if it rest upon nature's operations as
given in sensible experience, it can only be the expression that stands
as the equivalent for the rational explanation of all phenomena. But
if you accept the ultimate explanation or law as worthy of Divine
homage — as commanding universal adoration, what hinders you from
worshipping the lower explanations — the intermediate and secon-
dary laws P And if you adore the laws, what prevents you from
bowing before the multiplied objects which make up these laws —
from which these laws are inferred P If we prostrate ourselves be-
fore the one inclusive law that runs through all nature, why should
we not kneel, as did our rude progenitors, before each object that
we see P For if the whole be Divine, each component part must
share its character ; if the law be God, the phenomena — the mani-
festations of that law, are likewise gods : and thus we come, in a

ANCIENT AND MODEEN THEISM. 31

singular, but we believe legitimate, manner back to the earliest and
most primitive of all worships, the worship of nature in all her
forms — her woods, her hills, her streams, her seas, and stars, and
snns.

L

CHAPTER IV.

THE DIVINE IN NATURE.

" Every object is a window through which we may look into infinitude itself."

The opinions noticed in the previous chapter have been long held
by a certain class of minds with singular tenacity. They hare been
honoured with the name of divine philosophy by no less an authority
than Bacon, who considered that through this philosophy the rudi-
ments of knowledge concerning God were to be obtained. Even in
Bacon's day, however, enough had been said and written on the sub-
ject to lead him to warn men of the danger of excess in this divine
philosophy or natural theology, as prejudicial to religion and philo-
sophy alike; making heretical religion and fabulous philosophy, or,
what we can now say, making a modern mythology. In a sense it
is true that the universe is a Divine vision * and that reason in Ster-
ling's acceptation of that term, peculiar to Coleridge's mode of thought,
as the opposite of the sensuous understanding, is the inspired organ
for beholding it. The objects of nature tell something of God, bat
they do not tell this to every one. This is simply a matter of fact.
To a man like the Hebrew poet " the heavens declare the glory of
God, and the firmament sheweth His handiwork; day uttereth speech
unto day : and night unto night sheweth knowledge : " but the utter-
ance and the unfolding here spoken of are not to the intellect in man.
These voices may " go through all the earth," but the voices are not
heard by all, neither are they, when heard, the voices of abstract laws.
They are spiritual voices, which no law of man's formulating can
force from nature, but which will be heard within the soul, provided
the soul be strung to the higher spiritual harmonies, and not hemmed
in by the vesture of a sensible or merely intellectual life.

"Who can by searching find out GodP" is the unanswerable
interrogation marked on the attempts of theistic thinkers. A rough
answer, a direct negative in fact, has been given by many in all
times: an answer which every one anxious for the complete
development of our nature must regret, since the reply is dis-
astrous both to intellectual and religious life ; it has been elicited,

• John Sterling.

THE DIVINE IN NATURE. 33

however, by well-meaning theists, who imagine that their proof is
divinely adapted for the conviction of atheists, while it has turned
out to have exactly the opposite effect. The denial is unfortunate
for another reason. It gives to science and pare intellectual effort
a false position, and to religion an apparent antagonism to science.
It has forced the one, on hostile intent, into the territory of the other,
and the operations of both in these foreign fields have been neither
profitable nor pleasant. Men of a religious spirit have long looked
with suspicion on the rapid advancement of scientific inquiry, and
begin to tremble lest the time may actually arrive when there shall
be nothing to explain. Scientific men have long regarded with
mingled fear and pity the obstructive attitude of theological minds.
The outcry against secondary causes and fearless probing of the
earth and scanning of the heavens has been answered by the
protest, not less loud, against the barrenness of the idea of the
spiritual.

We shall see that the protest is hasty, and as much without
reason as the outcry, produced mainly by the theistic view of nature,
which has sunk so deeply into men's minds as to lead them to the
belief that because science seeks more and more to drive causation,
as generally understood, out of its sphere, that, therefore, God is
driven out of the universe which He has made. The Divine light
in the world, however, never shone through the observations of
science taken by itself. Its beams came through another channel.
It was the religious consciousness of man that felt " the invisible
things" of God to be shadowed forth "by the things that are
made." The world pointed always to something behind itself, to
the Divine that was in it, and in all nature. It is, therefore, what
is to be expected — a thing the spiritual consciousness could anti-
cipate, when we are told " that the dissecting knife has never yet
laid bare a soul to the glance of the anatomist, nor the sweep of a
telescope brought a God within the astronomical vision." The
conclusion alone drawn from this is wrong and unwarrantable, viz.,
that these things do not exist It might at least be possible
to think that these objects are not thus made known to us. It
may as well be urged, as indeed we think it has been, that the
thoughts of other men are non-existent because in themselves in-
visible to the bodily eye, as that the soul of man and the being of
God are fancies, because anatomy and astronomy do not include
them in their facts of observation. No science or method of in-
quiry can trespass beyond its own sphere and declare what is, and

i>

84 SEASON AND REVELATION.

what, is not, possible elsewhere. The power of deciphering natural
laws, and explaining the appearances of sensible things, and foretell-
ing with unerring certainty their occurrences in distant time, is
invaluable; but to any candid mind it must appear to be dearly
bought by the loss of vision of the spiritual world, and comprehension
of its higher laws and faith in its ultimate triumph, which inspired
the spirits of those men in whom the spiritual consciousness was
evolved of old. And it is all the worse when it is considered that this
high price, or in feet any price, is altogether unnecessary. There is
nothing contradictory in the notion of a rigid and scientific know-
ledge and study of the outward, sensible world and a spiritual
realisation of the relation of God to the world — such a realisation,
for example, as we have given us in the Jewish conception of the
Divine in nature. That is, however, wholly different from the modern
theistic conception. It is a light upon the kosmos, and is free
from those merely sensible limitations, which are so characteristic
of the last induction of generalised experience. In so speaking, I
am far from saying that the Jewish conception was not conditioned,
but its conditions were those limitations of the spiritual nature that
necessarily accompany its imperfect development. The clearer
enunciations of the Divine revelation in history and nature, shaping
themselves from time to time among the Jews, were consequent on
growing powers of spiritual perception, and are the natural results of
advanced spiritual life and nearer realisation of God, and not
dependent on increased sensible observation of the external world
for scientific purposes and by scientific methods. The fundamental
idea of the Hebrew literature and the peculiar feature of the Jewish
mind is its clear consciousness of the Divine everywhere. The Spirit
that moved upon the waters at the beginning was really a cognition
by the spiritual in man, and not a thought given through the dis-
covery of more or less regularity in the world of nature, and through
the prosecution of causes to the end of the unbroken series. This
idea is opposed to the modern conception, and to pagan notions of
the Divine in nature. One of the unknown Hebrew poets hits off
this distinctive origin of the idea in the Hebrew consciousness, when
he replies in answer to the question, "Where shall wisdom be found? "
" The depth saith, It is not in me." Their kosmogony is not, in the
first place at least, an embryonic stage of science; its first word never
touches the earth, it descends from heaven. God is the explanation
of creation, and not creation the explanation of God. The Divine,
with the Hebrews, shines into the darkness of the sensible, and makes

THE DIVINE IN NATURE. 35

it fall of its own glory ; the sensible thereafter becomes for them re-
plete with the splendour and meaning of what is beyond sense. It
was probably this that Jean Paul meant by his remark, that " the
first leaf of the Mosaic document has more weight than all the
folios of physicists and philosophers ; " and yet the theologian labours
at a reconciliation of this poem with the utterances of physicists
and philosophers.

The Divine, which men have striven to see through the visible
alone, has ever been an inexplicable mystery — the last fact that
resists analysis. But the Divine which is revealed to the Hebrew con-
sciousness is no such postulate of mental impotence, but is rather
the key to unlock mysteries ; it is the germ of the spiritual drama
that is gradually developed in the midst of the visible and material
creation. At first, as might be expected, the knowledge of this great
spiritual fact was dim, but it ultimately became clearer, and is no-
where represented by the writers of the Bible as beyond the per-
ception of the man with powers adapted for its reception. Its
impenetrability for all else is everywhere maintained. From the
kosmical side "clouds and darkness " are about God. The truths con-
cerning the spiritual either in man or nature are beyond the under-
standing, as the faculty for combining the various sense experiences
of life. The Jews, it will be objected, beg the whole question of
the spiritual element in nature and man. But how can it be said
with any reason that to start from a fact is to beg a question ? The
spiritual consciousness has, as I have already hinted, as much right
to begin with the fact of the Divine or supernatural, as the physical
philosopher with the fact of the natural. The latter does not at
each stage of advancement in thought, or with the exposition of each
new theory, commence with a proof of the whole sphere of the
natural. If he did so, he would never get beyond this ; for the one
problem is, philosophically speaking, as difficult of solution as the
other, and both seem equally, what are called, metaphysical puzzles.
It might be well if the spiritual consciousness, assuming the super-
natural, as physicists do the natural, proceeded to raise the science,
or whatever form of knowledge is possible, of those facts that fall
within its sphere. The discussion on the first term has altogether
precluded advance in spiritual truth beyond imaginative flights.
There has been hitherto no strict method in the discussion of the
problems that it presents ; there is as yet no recognised organon. But
if differences of opinion about the existence or non-existence of matter
and the external world, and beings in that world, never hindered

D 2

36 REASON AND REVELATION.

men of science from investigating the occurrences in the natural
world ; nay more, if those in the present day who most strenuously
deny the possibility of knowing such things in themselves are fore-
most in seeking to know and explain the relations of this unknown
Something, — we are at a loss to see why the inquiry into the super-
natural or spiritual should wait the conclusion of the dispute about
its existence or non-existence. So far as this fundamental question
of the spiritual is concerned, it is, if not in a better, at least in no
worse a position than the same metaphysical problem regarding the
natural.

The fact of larger generalisations in pure science having been
reached by us does not altogether account for the difference between
the view of nature held by the Jewish mind, and that held by the
modern mind, or for the ancient mythological spirit on which
the latter is based ; they are conceptions of nature from opposite
sides of our being : the one from the idea of the supernatural and
through spiritual insight, the other from the idea of the sensible and
through intellectual forms. We are true to our mental constitution
and its relations to sensuous experience, when we accept secondary
laws as explanatory of the changes transpiring around us ; the Jews
were no less true to their spiritual constitution when their writers
recounted these as the direct doings of God. The full truth lies in
the complement of the two truths. That which is valuable to us
in the Jewish thought and literature is this realisation of the Divine
action in the universe of being — an action imminent and direct. The
cultivation and development of their spiritual consciousness enabled
the Jews to perceive and hold fast the idea of God as a Being moving
throughout the whole frame of things: His garment is the light, and
with it the Almighty clothes Himself. He stretches out the heavens
like a curtain, and in the deep layeth the beams of His chambers.
He covered the earth with the deep as with a garment; the waters
stood above the mountains : at His rebuke they fled, and hasted away
at the voice of His thunder. To them the breath of nature and the
breath of man were but the breath of the overliving God : mingling
with surrounding elements, yet mixed with none ; using and employ-
ing the many accompaniments of natural life, yet bound to none ; free
as the wind of heaven that gathers clouds from the four quarters of
the earth and builds their cumulated waters in mid-air, yet passes
on with unimpeded swiftness through the realms of space ; free as
the same wind that shows its presence among the curling billows
of the sea and in the spray that wets the hanging clouds — thai

i

THE DIVINE IN NATOEE. 37

manifests its movements in the bending forest and the waving fields,
and yet is neither of the sea nor of the forest nor the field, but is
in truth that spiritual breath, which since the dawn of time has sped
with unseen wings through all the dull material universe and given
it the semblance of that which it alone possesseth : He breathes,
and everything is jubilant with motion; He withholds His breath, and
death and silence reign* throughout the world. In such a conception
we are as far from pantheism as we are from a kosmical deity.
While there is no severance of Him from the constant operations of
nature — for "He watereth the hills from His chambers/ 1 — the seasons
are in His hand, the rest of man and beast, — there is no confusion
of Him with the external world : " He commanded, and it stood fast ;"
"He walketh upon the wings of the wind." Like our own spirits
tenanting their bodily homes, He tenants His vast creation: in it,
but not of it ; operating through it, yet transcending it ; speaking
through its glories to spiritual intelligences capable of appreciating
the language, even as man communicates himself to man ; showing
forth the invisible spiritual splendour that is hidden from the
merely sensible perception, even as the human soul looks out of its
windows to a sympathetic spirit.

I am not at present specially concerned with the science of the
Jews. Their views of nature from the standpoint of science, as
seen in their literature, are somewhat crude.* They had not risen
possibly above a primitive perception of the system* of nature. It is
quite likely that their spiritual attitude tended to restrain scientific
observation and inquiry into the relations of ordinary sense-given
experiences. At all events, the contrast is sufficiently marked
between the great discoveries recently made in every branch of
natural knowledge, and the position, so far as we understand it, of
the Jews. Our conception of time in past eternity, for instance, by
means of geological investigations, has been indefinitely enlarged
space has new meanings for us since telescopic vision has enabled

* We should remember, however, that the Jewish literature whioh has oome
down to us, as I shall afterwards have occasion to point out, is strictly frag-
mentary. It has been preserved for a special purpose, and this purpose necessarily
excluded much that might have modified our opinions with regard to their acquire-
ments in natural science. There must, for instance, have been some foundation
for the report in 1 Kings iv. 31-33 about Solomon. Besides the composition of
3000 proverbs and 1000 songs, he is there said to have spoken of trees, of beasts,
and fowls, and creeping things, and fishes ; but none of this literature has been
preserved. We know also the mere names of those he is said to have excelled
in these branches of study.

38 REASON AND REVELATION.

118 to descry the incalculable distances of world from world ; ethno-
logical and cognate archaeological researches among the remains of
the early progenitors of onr race have forged for us a seemingly
interminable chain of existence, whose first links can only be dimly
imagined, but whose extent is nearly commensurate with our
expanding ideas of time and space. All this, however, does not
affect in any material way the Jewish conception of the Divine in
nature as a spiritual conception, although it may affect our notions
of the relations between the Divine and the natural. Every truth
has relations to every other truth, although we cannot yet, in every
case, exhibit the relations. While, therefore, the ideas of vastness in
time and space that have become familiar to the modern mind, may
make us remodel to some extent our own mode of conceiving the
Divine, they by no means compel us to dethrone the spiritual power
that was seen to be operative in the production and elaboration of a
world, in grandeur and immensity supposed to be infinitely below
that which we now perceive. But while speaking thus, it must be
remembered that we may, from the spiritual side of nature, exag-
gerate the results of science. The expanded prospect which science
discloses to us is an expansion in a great measure of that which in
little was always known to man. The Divine, when felt at all, is as
divine in a leaf as in a forest ; in one nation as in all history ; in
one world as in millions of worlds. It should not be forgotten,
however, that if a Being all powerful, all wise, perfect in all things,
was perceived by spiritual discernment in the poor conception of
a world which the Hebrew mind could form, the same faculty of
perception will by no means think Him absent from the widen-
ing scheme which present investigations indubitably unfold, simply
because of the greater scheme. There is a difference in degree
merely, and not in kind, between the early and the modern re-
sults of science. If, therefore, a Being directing and controlling
and revealing Himself in a comparatively temporary and sectional
world was not thought intrusive in its governance, the spiritual
intelligence can never consider him a meaningless fiction, or, what
is much the same thing, an ultimate and inexplicable fact, in a
world so boundless and incomprehensible as we now witness, and
only because of the boundlessness and incomprehensibility. If the
spiritual faculty felt that the Divine was behind the fiat which
spake the visible world into existence with that beauty apparent even
to unscientific observers, no less does it feel that the Bame nature is
revealed in the evolution of a world, by slow and gradual and

i

i

THE DIVINE IN NATURE. 39

uniform laws, from formless and chaotic matter, into that glorious
spectacle which we now behold with wider prospect in glittering
stars and suns resplendent, in land and sea with all the teeming
forms of life rising in beautiful jet simple gradation from half
animated beings to man made in the image of his Maker. The
spiritual conception is nowise dependent upon either the one
kosmical theory or the other. Whatever these investigations prove
or disprove, in themselves they can never be regarded as disproving
the spiritual idea developed among the Hebrews, although they may
show us that it was not by such methods that this order of ideas
was acquired ; for the only channel through which spiritual truth
can be made known to man is through something spiritual in him.
From the very nature of the communication this is necessary. If
there is a world of spirit — an unseen sphere, as it is expressed — with
relations to our inner being, it can only be discovered to us through
faculties appropriate to such relations. The relations of a different
sphere cannot channel these communications, nor can we raise
ourselves by such a ladder to heaven. The ladder ' must descend
from heaven, and thas bring home the objects of that sphere to our
awakened spiritual perceptions.

The spiritual element in nature thus discerned and recorded
by the Jews has never received that degree of attention and sys-
tematic treatment which the subject demands. It is noticed fre-
quently, bnt the object and its mode of cognition, and its relation to
the spiritual elements in the Bible, how far independent of that
revelation, and how and in what way discovered to us by it, has
never been investigated with any approach to thoroughness. We
all repeat — indeed, it has now become the most universal of all
religious beliefs, probably because it is really the most general of
religious truths, and conformable to the common experience of man :
" The invisible things of Him from the creation of the world are
clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even
His eternal power and Godhead." In speaking of the revelation
through nature, it must be distinctly understood that I make no
attempt to enter the field of the scientific observer, far less to super-
sede his investigations. No spiritual revelation in Scripture or else-
where, we are persuaded, can, unless by some strange and perverse
interpretation of it, be shown to supplant such inquiries; and when
the attempt has been made to do this, as has been too often the case
in biblical theology, the false interpreter of Scripture has been pro-
perly beaten off the field by the true and scientific interpreter of nature,

40 REASON AND REVELATION.

— true, that is, in the limits to which he confines himself ; false he
may be, and is, when he dogmatises regarding what is beyond these
limits. Within the domain of observable sensible phenomena he is,
however, right in maintaining that sensible experience alone has a
claim to be received, and that conclusions drawn from such ex-
perience are alone valid. This position and attitude of mind towards
external nature need not, and does not, interfere with the spiritual
manifestations that to a spiritual consciousness may of ten be discovered
in these experiences, and which, as we have already shown, scientific
observation merely as snch, if true to its method, cannot take account
of and must not mingle with its observations. The visible, we said,
always pointed to something behind it, shadowing forth, as Paul
says, the invisible and Divine to the religions consciousness. This
is apparent in the Jewish life and literature, but it is most evident,
as is all spiritual manifestation, in the great Bevealer of the Father.
Christ's parables may, perhaps, be taken as the type of this form of
revealed spiritual truth as well as an illustration of the different
spheres of the two orders of truth given in nature, and of their
different methods. The thirteenth chapter of Matthew (parallel
Mark iv.) contains some of these finest utterances. It is, as all have
acknowledged who have paid any attention to the subject, a store-
house of most valuable spiritual instruction, a rich mine of truth.
The beauty of the surrounding scene and the eagerness of the
expectant multitude appear, as they often did in Christ's history, to
have unlocked the treasury of His Divine spirit, and, as it were, to
have urged the great Teacher and Bevealer to pour forth the fulness
of His spiritual wealth, and at the same time (by showing to others
its source) to impart to them the means of constantly adding, by
their own spiritual experience and observation, to what He had com-
municated. These appear to be the results, or the intended results,
of the parabolical teaching of Jesus. He employed this kind of
teaching, not as an instrument of didactic communication alone, — for
it is not simply profusion of thought that attracts us and rightly so
to a passage such as this in the record of the life of Jesus, but in
addition to this, and what concerns our present purpose, the essential
spiritual element in such teaching found in the colouring of the
thoughts or rather in their mediated channel. In His Sermon on
the Mount there are deliverances of truth no less sublime, but the
form peculiar to the present case is absent. Here we have, in a
manner, the process of revelation as well as its result. In the
Sermon on the Mount we have the result merely.

THE DIVINE IN NATURE. 41

As He sat in the boat moored near the shore of that northern
Palestinean lake, with pictures of loveliness stretching np the slopes
towards " the olive-crowned heights " that bent down to look into
the clear unspotted bine, that they might see themselves reflected
in the transparent mirror, we do not wonder that Christ, like all fine
spiritual natures, susceptible to all pure influences, should have
steeped His thoughts in those rare natural tints that floated through
the sky and up the hills and over the bosom of the inland sea.
Ever natural and vivid in His teaching, we are not surprised to find
in such a passage of His life that fine inter-penetration of outward
physical beauty and inner spiritual truth. But there is more than
this in the passage. That would merely be the natural outcome ot
a fine imaginative power. Here it is not simple imagination that is
at work, although imagination is necessarily operative in the process.
The scene was one no doubt of impressive natural loveliness, and
well fitted to excite an imaginative mind ; but to that is added in
the case of Christ a faculty of another order. To His inner eye it
unveiled a spiritual beauty. To Him, in a measure beyond all
others, the invisible things were plainly manifest by the things that
are made ; the fields and trees, the harvest and the sea, became trans-
formed beneath His touch, and were charged, — and to others now
because they were to Him, — with all the awe, the heightened gran-
deur, the profound expression of the unseen. To His keen spiritual
insight the sower assumed the dread proportions of the great spirit-
ual Husbandman ; the stately trees increased in height and spread
their arms abroad and filled infinitude with their deepening shade,
while unwonted sounds were heard among their leaves ; the waving
forests of golden grain became a surging crowd of men and women
falling before the sickle of a mysterious reaper ; the sea became the
guardian of untold wealth, for which strange fishermen threw their
nets into the deep. In this manner Christ poured forth lessons of
spiritual wisdom in the warm hues of a spiritual imagination, — the
beautiful drapery covering, but instead of concealing vividly mani-
festing, because really an indissoluble part, of the soul of truth within.
With perfect mastery and infinite skill, this Divine Teacher and
spiritual Revealer shows the intimate relations, that, for every spirit-
ually awakened consciousness, exist between the natural and the
spiritual The outward material universe did not hide from Him
what it hides from us, even although coming after Him, and hides so
much as to be totally denied sometimes, — the spiritual principles
that lie beneath and accompany its manifestations. To His spiritual

42 REASON AND REVELATION.

consciousness the entire world of nature appears as the speech of the
world of spirit. As words are to ns the expression of our thoughts
and feelings, so sensible objects are to Him the utterance of what
is otherwise invisible to sense. As we make signs to each other in
order to reveal the hidden world of onr inner consciousness to
those around us, so the great spiritual consciousness makes known
itself to him who can receive its intimations through the signs of
nature. For the essential feature of teaching by parables, as Christ
taught, is that of a setting forth of inner, invisible, spiritual, things,
by things outward and visible and natural. There must in most
cases be a great obstacle when any one attempts to speak of spiritual
matters to those who know little or nothing about them, and have
small capacity for knowing them. To men who have an eye sim-
ply for what is sensible and present, some way has to be. opened for
the passage of what is spiritual and present too, but not discernible
by them. Language, even, is often a hindrance and not a help to
one who has spiritual truth to communicate, for our language is
made for our everyday life. Oar Bpeech is perhaps the most mate-
rial thing about us ; our words are very tenacious in their hold upon
what is earthly. We are apt to overlook this in our repetition of
" winged words ; " but when we consider, we shall find that language
has an unmistakable metallic ring about it, — always the echo more or
less of some material tone or other. It is in reality an imitation —
often a very close and literal one, of what we see and hear and feel.
Even at the present day, when it has reached a considerable degree
of refinement, partly as the natural result of tear and wear, similar
to the weathering in geology, and partly as the result of its appli-
cation in the course of time and extended experience to express what
is immaterial, we are carried back by association to objects that are
thoroughly material. The language of divine science and the names
of the gods in ethnic and all religions lead us directly from heaven
to earth, whence in the course of ages names and gods alike have
sprung. When we speak of any subject relating to our own mental
or spiritual nature we employ what is, in a kind of way, a para-
bolical mode of speech.' Now, Christ as the revealer of a spiritual
life and experience came to tell men what they could not, on ac-
count of a more or less darkened spiritual consciousness, find out for
themselves. He came to speak to them of something that their
eyes had not seen, nor their ears heard, nor their hands handled, —
of something, therefore, which their minds could not adequately con-
ceive. For their minds were fed, as it were, by eye and ear and

THE DIVINE IN NATUKE. 43

hand from the merely visible, audible, and tangible world. He came
thus, it is evident, to tell men about things strange to their lan-
guage. He had spiritual things to communicate, but if He was to
be understood at all, He must use the words men use. That appears
at first a great obstacle. We are apt to think that this revelation
of what was above the reach of ordinary experience — the unveiling
of a Divine order, could only be a partial unveiling when such a
heavy curtain was interposed. And so, perhaps, we shall find this to
be the case. The full light of the unseen world can scarcely shine
through the material covering in which it comes to us, not to speak
of the dnlness of our spiritual apprehension. Indeed, Paul tells us
"we see through a glass, darkly"; and this glass through which
we look at spiritual splendours is, I should think, partly the material
language through which we have to approach the subject) partly, of
course, the sin, and the darkness that sin throws over our spiritual
vision, — the refusal to do God's will hiding that will from us to the
extent of our refusal. It may be that we could not look upon that
glory face to face now — that as with darkened glass we are enabled
to look at the sun's blaze and blench not, so only is it permitted us,
with our weak spiritual vision, to gaze on the exceeding glory
through a more or less darkened medium. We must, however, try
to brighten the medium, or rather, it will of itself grow brighter and
become adapted to our increasing strength of spiritual sight, so that
there will not always remain the looking through, but ultimately,
like the highest spiritual consciousness, we shall see " face to face "
and know as we are known. "No man hath seen God ;" but He who
"is in the bosom of the Father" is gradually fitting us for the vision,
and also for that nearness to God so vividly expressed by being "in
His bosom." Part of the preparation is to be found in the paraboli-
cal teaching. Somewhat after the manner we have mentioned, it
may be said that all speech when applied to what is spiritual is pa-
rabolical. I must speak of these things in parables, was Christ's
experience as a teacher of man's spiritual consciousness.

If Christ was to be understood, even in His didactic communica-
tions, He could only be understood by applying the words used in
trade, amusement, common actions, to spiritual affairs. We have
only to consider how many states of the soul Christ describes in
language which is primarily applicable to the body ; e.g., the opening
of the Sermon on the Mount, which is perhaps the least para-
bolical part of His recorded teaching, is full of material sugges-
tions. Our idea of poverty is derived from physical poverty ; the

44 REA80N AND REVELATION.

idea of kingdom applied to heaven has necessarily a material
association in all our minds ; hunger and thirst used of the soul
are, I need not say, decidedly corporeal; pureness applied to the
heart has a similar material origin; and so of the other illustra-
tions of spiritual facts here and elsewhere in the Bible. This,
however, is not exactly what is meant by teaching in parables.
Teaching spiritual things by words drawn from material things is,
however, a near approach to it ; and inasmuch as, in this case, it is
the current symbols of the material that are employed for the pur-
pose of shadowing forth the realities of the immaterial, it comes very
close to what we said was the essential feature of the parable, and
in an advanced state of culture the two may be interchangeable.
Teaching in parables, strictly speaking, however, is the making
known the unseen and spiritual by visible things themselves and not
by the mere mental copies of such things. A parable is thus a sort
of picture of the spiritual world presented to our mental vision. It
has the effect of a double revelation. Besides conveying to us
spiritual facts and principles, it is the discovery to us of a new lan-
guage by which the new truths of the unseen are made clearer. The
parable in Christ's hands may be said to unveil to men, not only the
truths of the new kingdom, but its language as well. In this way we
possess through them the special knowledge of the spiritual which
Christ taught in definite parables, and, as far as it is possible for us,
a general knowledge of spiritual speech. And what a splendid lan-
guage for those awakened spiritual beings who more or less fully
understand its powerful syllables ! To what sublime spiritual truths
does it not give utterance ! To what high regions of thought does
it not point ! But how unutterable in our poor language must these
truths ever be ! How impossible to frame these great thoughts in our
small moulds ! We often witness the ineffectual efforts of childhood
to embrace in its limited vocabulary the conceptions of manhood ; but
how much easier a task is this for children than is the labour for us
men to comprehend fully the spiritual in our common speech, or to
employ that speech as the channel of Divine things ! Our language
bears, and must always faithfully bear, if it is to be true, the impress
of our thought ; and as our thought is bounded very much by the
sensible, so must our expression of it labour under the same defect.

But who can set bounds to the thought of God, or circumscribe
His knowledge and truth and their manifestations to man ; and what
language but His own can fully speak the deep things of (rod ?
His mind, if I may use such languago, must have infinite channels

THE DIVINE IN NATURE. 45

through which His thoughts may flow in their continual revelations
to other beings. Divine truths, I conceive, must have an utterance
as Divine. It is, however, as difficult for us to understand the
language with any fulness and exactness as it is to comprehend the
thoughts belonging to the sphere to which it is related. We need
an interpreter of this heavenly tongue : this sublime and godlike
speech. We may, as some suppose, know in a dim way that it is
" the voice of the Lord G-od " in His garden ; but the voice does
not bring to us at the same time any other feelings than those of
fear and spiritual terror.* The strangeness of the language is, in
truth, at first as perplexing as the singularity of the facts which it
embodies. We require, as I say, a teacher to articulate the words
to us and unveil their meaning ; and in the scene on the Palestinean
lake, and elsewhere in Christ's life, we have Christ — surely the
highest spiritual consciousness that men have known, this, whatever
else He was, all must acknowledge — we have Him, not only com-
municating the knowledge of Divine truths, but also communicat-
ing the knowledge of the Divine speech through which we may
understand these truths. He not only introduces us into the king-
dom of heaven, but explains to us the language of its inhabitants ; and
in this way He places in our hands a key that will unlock many of its
otherwise hidden spiritual meanings. This latter aspect of the para-
bles appears to me to be a view of them that is too often overlooked
in our eagerness to draw from them definite lessons for our guidance
and instruction in life. To get at the principle of the teaching,
if it really is what we say it is, would be more to the purpose than
to understand any lesson of any particular parable, valuable as that
is. The main importance, however, of any individual parable in
that aspect of them which I am insisting on, is its illustration of a
general principle which we are ourselves to apply. And this is
really the case with much that is in the Bible besides the parables.
There is an absence of definiteness and system on any subject or
truth. The book as a whole is more fitted to awaken spiritual
activity and direct its effort than to satisfy an indolent receptivity.

* All early stages of ethnic religion show that this, in a highly exaggerated
degree, is precisely what nature does suggest to the primitive spiritual conscious-
ness. When we first meet the Hebrew spirit face to face with nature, the
Divine voice was recognised with fear it is true, but not with such abject and
continuous fear as that with which other religions have made us familiar. At
an early date in Hebrew history fear appears to have given place to close com-
munion. " I was afraid . . . and hid myself," their first man said ; he is
however drawn from his hiding.

46 EEASON AND REVELATION.

Once get at the principle of life in it, and growing spiritual
experience and observation will supply the rest. This is the case in
the present instance. We have received the key, as we said, and
seen the way in which it is to be used ; we have got the method
with a few illustrations of the manner of its application in detail ;
and our duty is not to rest satisfied with what Christ has given us
in the few priceless treasures which He unlocked, or consider the
illustrative examples that He left, as the ultimate result of this Divine
method for the spiritual interpretation of nature. We must take
the key in our own hands, and search for ourselves after this hidden
treasure of the Divine ; we must master the method, and advance
beyond the illustrations to new conquests and discoveries of our own.

No one who has any intellectual vitality at all, comfortably
settles down after having mastered the illustrative instances of a
scientific method, for example, as if these were the end of the
matter and not the beginning. It is only in the spiritual that we
are so much inclined to mistake the starting point for the goal. We
need to be urged always by that very earnest entreaty of the writer of
the Epistle to the Hebrews, " therefore, leaving the principles of the
doctrine of Christ, let us go on unto perfection." We either accept
the principles as facts and not methods, or, accepting these necessary
elements of all after growth as principles, are too indolent or
timorous in applying them. We have failed to see the Divine in
nature as Christ saw it, because we do not believe that He came, not
merely to give us a revelation of the Divine everywhere, but to
give us power and vision of our own to see what He saw. It has
thus happened to us as to many in whose hearing the parables were
originally uttered : seeing, we see not ; and hearing, we hear not,
neither do we understand. Now, as then, it is given to some " to
know the mystery of the kingdom of heaven ; " but in this kind
of knowledge, as in other kinds, there is an unavoidable condition of
continued perception and growth in it : viz., this, that " whosoever
hath to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance;
but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that
he hath."

And this condition is by Christ Himself attached, not merely to
the more advanced stage of spiritual perception, but to the very
beginnings of its exercise. If it has not been given to us in increasing
abundance to see God in nature and common experience as well as in
a past revelation, it is because we would not. The consequence of
this is not simply that we have lost much that we inherit from the

THE DIVINE IN NATURE. 47

former experiences of religions men, bnt much also of the power of
seeing for ourselves. For have we, — I do not mean men generally
sceptical of religions experience, — not even come to question whether
the recorded experiences of the religions minds of former times are
to be received by us as facts of the spiritual life, or to be regarded
merely as delusions of a vigorous fancy or fanatical enthusiasm ? It
has actually come to be a matter of grave doubt and of not very
uncommon denial, or more generally indifference and quiet shelving
of the whole question of the spiritual. If discussed at all, it is
discussed not as a matter of fact needing testimony and proper
accrediting only ; it is the very possibility of the fact that is matter
of dispute. Verily we have lost even that which we had. There
are some again who do not see the Divine in nature and in the
occurrences of the hour, but who profess to see it in the events of an
ancient people and in nature at special points in the history of that
people. To say the least of it, such professions must be open to
grave suspicion. No doubt many think sincerely that they see the
Divine in these distant times, although the present gives no such
intimations to them ; but it is an intellectual perception, not a spiritual
recognition answering to a constant personal experience of their own.
The tendency of modern thought is, however, very much set in
another direction, nor can the tendency be effectually counteracted
unless through the view of nature as taught by Christ in the parables
asserting itself in our spiritual consciousness. There is (all spirit-
ually minded men must feel it) very much in our scientific study of
nature and social life that tends to conceal the spiritual reality given
through both, just as in former times the vivid perception of the
spiritual in these facts of daily experience had the effect of weaken-
ing to some extent the scientific spirit. It would be foolish to say one
word against scientific inquiry. It is absolutely necessary that it
should be carried on and not only so, but that its true spirit should
be more widely diffused than it is. There is the false spirit of it,
which bearing its name, shows itself by its flippancy and arrogance
to be separated from it by the wide gulf of ignorance and scientific
inexperience. It is not so much men of science as men who have no
science, but depend upon the vague rumours and reports of those
who know a little, who have gone out of their way to deny or refuse
to recognise the spiritual element that pervades all nature and life.
These men forget that on the showing of the best and most honest
inquirers not a tithe of the mysteries of the external universe have
as yet been discovered.

48 REASON AND REVELATION.

We need oar spiritual sympathies awakened by contact with the
spirit of Christ, that the faculties of that part of our nature may be
excited and made susceptible to the impression of the Divine which
meets us everywhere, but is not everywhere recognisable by us for
want of inner correspondence. The union of a susceptible spiritual
consciousness with revived scientific earnestness can alone give us a
complete view of human life and nature. Most men are sensible at
present of a view that is altogether partial and inadequate to facts
and unsatisfactory to the human spirit. By the union indicated we
should derive from familiarity and intercourse with nature, not
merely intellectual impetus, but spiritual invigoration as well, through
the mutual interaction, never before in any fulness experienced by
our race, of those hitherto opposing forces. Our treasured ex-
periences and observations in both directions would then lead us to
that higher truth and higher world which, call it what we will, it is
our end and purpose to reach; instead of, as now, leading us
through the smoke of the conflict of our twofold nature — whither
we do not very well know, but each one trusting somehow that he
is in the right way, and if charitable, hoping that his neighbour is
similarly fortunate, although he may be advancing in what, to all
appearance, is a very contrary direction.

It seems, so far as we can at present make out, natural to believe
that there exist closer relations than are generally supposed between
all forms of life, the spiritual and natural included. This idea is at
the root of Christ's teaching by parables. When, therefore, our per-
ceptions of these two great orders of truth are widened and deepened,
each in its own sphere and by its own method, we may find some
universal principle of being that binds all things to one common source
and centre. At any rate let us lay our nature open to the unseen
and Divine in all life as well as to the seen. We have faculties for
the recognition of both elements. Goethe, who saw deeper into the
scientific side of nature than many of its professed investigators, and
just because of his knowledge of another side, has said, —

" War 1 nioht das Auge sonnenhaft,
Die Sonne konnt' es nie erblioken ;
Lag' nioht in una des Gottes eigne Kraft
Wie konnt 1 uns Gottliohes entzfioken ? "

And the rapture of the Divine was as genuine an experience in the
life of Goethe, and may be in ours also, as the beholding of the sun ;
the former implying Divine energy in us, as the latter implies the
eye " sonnenhaft."

CHAPTER V.

THE PLACE OP CONSCIENCE IN SPIRITUAL REVELATION THE

ORIGIN OP MORAL TRUTH.

" Insofern, mag man sagen, class die Religion fiber der Moral stehe, weil sie
aus einer noeh tieferen Quelle stromt, in einen noeh nrspriinglioheren Grand
zuriickgeht."

If nature by indication and sensible observation oannot reveal the
spiritual, it may be, as some maintain, that it is given in the con-
science of man. This is far from being true, however, if it is
imagined, as is sometimes done, that the conscience in itself gives
man this revelation, or is anything more than one of the conditions
of it. Suppose it were a medium; no media can themselves furnish
that which they mediate. The revelation must be without the
mediating instrument. The conscience may be one of those indis-
pensable conditions of the perception of the spiritual communications
to be made to mankind. The mistake generally made regarding
the relation of conscience to a revelation arises in a great measure
from a misapprehension of what revelation really is. It seems some-
times to be understood as a law given to us, written either on the
general conscience of mankind, as it is occasionally expressed, or in
the special records of a nation, or part of it written in the one place
and part in the other. In the words of Butler, it is concluded, that
because conscience asserts its supremacy over all the other influ-
ences in our constitution, it is the voice Divine within us, and
consequently a revelation of the Divine. We think we shall be able
to make it clear that this is not the case — that the strictly moral
feelings — that even the consolidated universal natural conscience, is
not in itself a revelation in the strict sense of an unveiling of the
spiritual, but is as distinct from this as is tfce physical sphere of
truth — that revelation, restricted to the manifestation of spiritual
relations, is not given by the conscience in its natural state. Al-
though the natural conscience is capable of elaborating a law or rule
for the guidance of life in certain relations, and although its proper
development may be a fundamental pre-requisite to a perfect spirit-
ual receptivity, it has these ends in common with other faculties of
our nature. Knowledge of physical truth and development of the

E

50 REASON AND REVELATION.

faculties of sensible perception may, perhaps, be likewise included,
along with a certain stage of moral advancement, in the expression
" fulness of the time."

This part of our inquiry, viz., the origin and nature of moral
ideas and processes, more than that of any other question regarding
our mental nature, has been the subject of keen debate and opposite
opinion, not only in relation to the matter now before us, but also
as a question in pure philosophy. Even in the latter connection,
however, theories have been propounded on the subject not always for
scientific purposes, but sometimes for religious and other interests,
and the real matter has been too frequently obscured and hidden
under irrelevant or subsidiary discussions. The chief objection to
Butler's theory of conscience, for example, as well as to that of
many others more or less resembling his in its fundamental con-
ception is, that he takes the existent conscience as his only authority.
When he describes the faculty as "a superior principle of reflec-
tion, which distinguishes between the internal principles of man's
heart as well as his external actions, which passes judgment upon
himself and them, pronounces determinately some actions to be in
themselves just, right, good, others to be in themselves wrong, evil,
unjust ; which without being consulted, without being advised with,
majestically exerts itself, and approves or condemns him — the doer of
them accordingly, and which, if not forcibly stopped, naturally and
always of course, goes on to anticipate a higher and more effectual
sentence, which shall hereafter second and affirm its own," — when
Butler speaks thus, we must feel that he is speaking not of what
Paul thought when he said, " for when the Gentiles which have not
the law do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having
not the law, are a law unto themselves ; " but that he speaks of
what those men feel who have had a veritable revelation from Gk>d.
Butler's concluding description of the process of advancing "to
anticipate a higher sentence," etc., is in reality the spiritual con-
science with which Paul was contrasting the unenlightened Gentile
conscience, and it is the latter of which Butler is, or as a philosopher
ought to be, treating in the passage quoted above. We shall not at
present consider the method (so well illustrated in the above quo-
tation) of confounding advanced states, not only of conscience, but
more fully of our general consciousness with earlier states. We
shall have occasion below to notice this more in detail as distinctive
of a school in philosophy known as the & priori school of mental
philosophers. We may safely hold that the primitive conscience,

THE PLACE OF CONSCIENCE IN REVELATION. 51

so far as we can discover by investigation through comparative
psychology, is a very different thing from that which Butler here
represents it to be ; and regarding it, as we do, not as an original
source of revelation, but only as one among other means of perceiv-
ing that revelation when it dawned upon man, we are convinced
that its development, and the characteristics distinguishing it from
other mental faculties which we possess, are traceable to external
and unrevealed facts. The law or laws that explain the ordinary
mental life of man and his ordinary relations are held by some in a
great measure to explain, and by others fully to account for, what is
often supposed to be given us originally in conscience. The fact
seems to be, that besides the physical relations and circumstances by
which, in common with all sentient life, men are surrounded, they
have other relations proceeding from the greater complexity of their
nature. Among these relations are those which have received the
distinctive name of moral relations, which impress men differently
from the physical surroundings of their being, but have this
characteristic in common with these physical and all other experi-
ences whatever, that they are all reducible to relations affecting our
sensitivity, and are, therefore, subject to the same law. In studying
the facts of the moral life, it must not be imagined that an in-
vestigation into the origin of the principles of this life implies a
denial of the moral sense — of feelings of approbation or disapproba-
tion following certain actions ; all that we or those who pursue this
method attempt, is to account for these varied phenomena; the pro-
posed explanation of them being attained by instituting such obser-
vation and comparison of facts as we follow in our scientific treat-
ment of intellectual phenomena, or phenomena in the various
divisions of the world of nature. By a rejection of the intuitional,
or what, from our present position, we might call the quasi-revelation
theory of conscience, it is not meant to ignore as facts the pheno-
mena in our moral existence which this hypothesis is intended to
explain, although this sometimes appears to be alleged by the
intuitionalists. As well might Ptolemy or Kepler be said to have
denied the fact of a solar system because they each gave different
renderings of the laws of that system. The primary objection to
the quasi-revelation theory of conscience is, that it proceeds upon
the assumption that moral life and its manifestations, by reason of
their peculiar and special characteristics, have some special and
extraordinary origin. But if life and true knowledge are only pos-
sible as they each correspond to external relations, and if it be true

e 2

52 REASON AND REVELATION.

that these correspondences with the external world are only learned
after a varied number of experiences, the result of association con-
joined with other well-known subsidiary laws, it is difficult to see
why new laws, or a new hypothesis rather, should be considered
necessary to account for the production of correspondences and the
processes of these results, which in themselves cannot be shown to
be different from the other mental processes, although the relations
may be so different as to lead to a division or separate classification
of them for the purpose of more strict inquiry. Our ordinary men-
tal affections are probably in the last resort referable to two suscep-
tibilities of our nature, pleasure and pain,* and, in the endeavour
to conform to external circumstances, all sentient life is moved by
certain sensibilities which are affected in a given way. These
susceptibilities could only be permanently effective, either as sensa-
tions or ideas, in proportion as the organism felt them to be pleasur-
able or painful — the pleasurable causing attraction, the painful pro-
ducing aversion, in relation to the objects that so affected it. I
call these the ultimate explanations of such affections, because it
must be apparent that, as life becomes more complex through mul-
tiplied relations and experiences, the pleasurable and painful will
also assume greater complexity, although retaining their funda-
mental characteristic of being pleasurable and painful. This is
repeatedly overlooked by those who object to this final analysis
in any moral psychological problem, and their criticisms are, accor-
dingly, directed against an imaginary theory which no rational
psychologist could for a moment maintain, viz., that secondary,
as well as primary mental and emotional states may be resolved
into pleasure and pain as mere Bensuous affections. As life gains
in richness and variety, the causes of moral feeling become like-
wise richer and more varied; so that to account for the moral
beliefs and feelings of Europe in the nineteenth century, an elaborate

* Dr. Lazarus, among others, has spoken severely of this theory as an easy
method of bringing different phenomena under one abstract scheme. He pro-
poses, as more in accordance with science, to emphasise the peculiarity of moral
facts by laying down, as the germ of moral growth , two original moral feelings,
" die Billigong und der Tadel.'* It is obvious, I think, that these very feelings
presuppose a considerable growth in moral perception. Nor does Dr. Lazarus
meet this objection by premising, as he does, that these feelings must be under-
stood to be at the first without definite content. It would require very sub-
stantial evidence to show, that the feelings of approval and disapproval are
unaccompanied, at any stage, by a more or less definite content in perception.

THE PLACE OF CONSCIENCE IN REVELATION. 53

analysis of its complex life in its industrial, burghal, family, aesthetic,
religions, and other manifestations is absolutely necessary. But
notwithstanding this, it is true, as I have said, that the root of all
and the basal elements are attraction and repulsion.

In the actions of our fellow men which connect themselves with
our own life through relations which we call moral, and in our
own actions which touch others through the same relations, similar
susceptibilities are brought into play. It remains to trace the
cause of the increased energy of the feelings, and of what may be
peculiar in the character of the accompanying sentiments, in the
case of moral relations, and this may partly be done by a considera-
tion of the strong association which is naturally, and as a matter of
fact, formed between our feelings of pleasure and pain, and the ac-
tions, good or bad, of our fellow men. In the higher civilisation end-
less natural and fictitious associations combine with the primitive
association ; but it can be shown that the peculiarity of moral feel-
ing as such needs originally no other source for its explanation than
what I have here stated. In the environment it may be seen that
fortuitous relations are formed by fortuitous associations, and that a
stronger, or what is sometimes called a necessary relation, is formed
by a corresponding intensity, or, as it is occasionally designated,
necessity, in the mental impression. It is precisely so in the moral
relations. The strongly felt connection that exists between actions
and their influence upon our own wellbeing and that of others is
followed, according to the above principles, by a corresponding im-
pression on the mental relations, accompanied by an equally impres-
sive feeling. That a feeling of some kind attends every mental
state, and is dependent on the energy of the mental impression, and
proportioned to that energy, is a psychological fact. A cognition
may be accompanied by a wave of feeling in all possible degrees of
power, ranging from a feeling imperceptible, unless to minute
analysis, to one which is so passionate and overwhelming as to
transmute the thought entirely, and resolve it into an apparently
pure emotion with the faintest traces of a cognitive state. Many
ideas which were at first the unimpassioned possession of a philo-
sophical mind, and which were reached by inquiries in which feeling
was subordinated to, what we may call, simple intellectual action,have,
ultimately and through the gradation I speak of, become the property
of multitudes, and have so possessed the crowd as to be in fact an
^discriminating impulse, or blind semi-instinctive tendency, towards
some end. Such ideas will almost always be found at bottom to be

54 REASON AND REVELATION.

social, which are in reality moral. The strength of the feelings ac-
companying moral relations may perhaps be farther understood, if
we remember, that as experience is widened, the complexity of an
emotion increases in the same ratio as the complexity of the cogni-
tion to which it is attached. In this way there is brought about
a state, familiar to all psychologists, of highly complex emotions
originating in a manner similar to that in which complex ideas take
their rise, viz., by the coalescence of mental states, well known in
the operations of the human mind.

The difficulty here tarns on the method in which the complex
moral emotions and ideas are built up, that is, in other words, on the
law of the process. An attempt has been made to trace some of
these most general ideas and their corresponding emotions, such as
right and wrong, to authoritative command and legislative inter-
ference ; but these are rather modes in which such ideas and feelings
gather force and intensity than the expression of the source whence
they originate. We must take legislation and authoritative com-
mand into account, but only in a secondary way. The prominence
given to these facts, as forming the basis for a theory of moral
phenomena, is liable to the objection that has already been made to
the quasi-revelation theory, viz., that it starts from the present
condition of our moral nature only, and also presupposes a uniform
state of social and civil arrangements, like the present, prevailing in
earlier times, instead of seeking to know the actual primitive con-
dition of our moral being, and thereafter to explain the further
modifying influences which affected it, by change of circumstances,
such as the family bond and the organisation of society. Besides,
it may be well objected, as has been done, to all such theories as
that of education in morals, especially if they are held to be ex-
haustive, and of which legislative enactment is one form, that they
give no answer to the question, Who taught the teachers of the
laws, or customs, or morals, supposed to have been communicated or
enacted ? It is only putting the cause further back.

In the theory I have stated, all that needs to be assumed, unless
we presuppose what the quasi-revelation theory of conscience pre-
supposes, is the fact of a sentient life in some measure adapted, or
capable of becoming adapted, to its surroundings ; and this we have
as an actual, existing fact. Starting with this, and bearing in mind
what has been said, there is nothing singular and beyond the
sphere of common experimental truth in the subject of morals, to
necessitate the hypothesis of conscience as the source of revelation,

THE PLACE OF CONSCIENCE IN REVELATION. 55

and its so-called laws as revealed truths. If we have attained a
knowledge of right and wrong from the actions of our fellow men
in relation to whom we have been placed, by means of the funda-
mental susceptibilities of our nature, it is no more strange a thing
than the fact, that a knowledge of other relations should be gained
by the same means, seeing that a knowledge of both is necessary to
our very existence in these relations. Bight, wrong, law, justice,
good, bad, etc., do not exist in the primitive mind in the forms, antf
with the contents that they have at present. If these ideas exist at all
in any sense that can excuse us in applying such terms to them, they
exist in a very vague and chaotic form, as we shall immediately point
out. It is only after considerable experience that any such notions
can arise, and before they can become discriminated from other ex-
periences a power of observation and abstraction must be exercised,
which is strictly a development of later times. What perhaps pre-
vents many from understanding these general moral conceptions is
the old difficulty men have in distinguishing between abstractions
and realities. We fail often to realise that virtue and vice are
nothing more than general names formed, as all such general names
are formed, from the similarity of particular experiences. The
law at the basis of naming in morals is the same as that at the
basis of naming in other relations. But we are sometimes told in
the case of moral truths, as we are told in the case of other gener-
ated truths, that our moral ideas, or intuitions as they are called,
are immediate perceptions of qualities in certain objects, and that,
for example, on the bare contemplation of any ungrateful spirit
conscience declares it evil. We freely grant that our present con-
science may do such a thing, just as in Butler's language it may, if
not forced — we should prefer saying, it may, if trained, go on to
anticipate a higher and more effectual sentence, — a training which,
in its proper place, we shall see to be necessary to the full develop-
ment of the whole man. What we have granted, however, does
not answer the question why such an action as the one supposed
is stigmatised at all; or why this exercise of mind should be
thought utterly unlike an ordinary act of judgment, such as our
pronouncing at sight a stick to be straight. High transcendental
answers will not suffice to explain this, nor will insinuations against
a rationale of it, such as Dr. M'Cosh indulges in when he remarks,
that feelings generated by association are created independently of
our choice, and merely by outward contiguities, and inferior to

56 REASON AND REVELATION.

those which a higher (?) moral theory* furnishes when it declares,
that certain moral affections, — for example, gratitude, love, justice,
— are themselves good, and others evil, in their very nature. In
scientific investigation of any kind it is not usual to speak of a
higher and lower theory of facts, but generally of a true or false
theory.

The supreme and inclusive objection, by the men we have
mentioned, and those whom they represent, to an explanation of the
moral nature by experience and not by a sort of Divine revela-
tion in man — a law implanted in him, is, that the only explanation
that can be rendered intelligible is reckoned a base source for what
are called, and in some forms and types may well be considered,
"noble ideas" — that it is not possible to transmute the base
sensations into these noble ideas by any mental process. To
this we need only say in reply, that the law which explains any
class of phenomena in the most satisfactory and scientific manner,
and after sufficient verification, according to well known rules, is the
highest law (if we are to have such a phraseology), and the highest,
for the plain reason that it is the only, law of these phenomena, and
all other laws, transcendental and otherwise, are, not only inferior
to this, but altogether outside of it, being not laws at all, but
imaginary phantasms projected among certain phenomena with
which they have no correspondence. Paul, upon whose supposed
authority much of this reasoning is founded, knew something of foolish
things, and weak things, and base things confounding their opposites,
because he saw how much wiser, stronger, nobler, was God's foolish-
ness, weakness, baseness than man's ; and men of exact observation
in nature teach us, as indeed on a small scale every one can see for
himself, how constantly the same action of transmutation is going
on around us. From deformity we see beauty come forth every
spring season ; from blackened branches, fair flowers and graceful
foliage ; from handf uls of grain seemingly dead as the clod on which
they fall, life everywhere, making the outlying landscape resplendent
in its bright golden green . Decadence is, on the other side of it, a life
germ ; loveliness transforms even putrescence ; rich meadows, gay
with flowers and full of all fair imagery, rise out of barrenness and

* As another instance of this way of looking at the question I may mention,
that Professor Blackie, of Edinburgh, in his " Four Phases of Morals," is so
eager to vilify the experimental theory of morals that he never once touches
it as a scientific moralist. His criticisms, where he condescends, are directed
to his own'caricatores of the system.

THE PLACE OF CONSCIENCE IN REVELATION. 57

filth; deep glens, high peaks, broad lakes, and every inspiring
scene are wrought nobly by nature's lowliest ministers ; worms
trench onr soil, and give ns fertile mould equally with the most
scientific farming. From low to higher is nature's way. With a
few common elements she creates endless forms of being, organic
and inorganic, overpowering us with their grandeur and sublimity,
or delighting us with their beauty.

In answer to the theory, therefore, that pleasure and pain are the
elements that, operating by mental laws with our experience in
social relations, originate our moral' ideas, it is not sufficient to
hold language implying, that such a theory degrades these ideas,
as is done when it is asserted that these elements may originate
other ideas, but cannot generate such — ideas so full of meaning,
that they must be the product of some power above them. The
warning given, that the principle which explains moral ideas from
sense experience takes away conscience, which men now believe to
carry its own convictions and sanctions — the inborn sense and
native perception of good and evil — that it cuts down the tree that
has borne the fruit, that it kills the hen that laid the golden eggs,*
etc., is altogether out of place, since the principle takes away
nothing, but only seeks to explain, in a scientific manner, the origin
and growth of the things that now are. It is a question, not of
positing or denying a set of facts, but of explaining or generalising
them under a law. The question, stated generally, regards the
origin of ethical and social beliefs — what is just and unjust, honour-
able and base, pure and impure, obligatory to do, and obligatory not
to do— beliefs which are established facts, into which each new
member of society is born, and which, as he advances in life and
experience, he finds keeping pace with, or rather anticipating, that ad-
vancement. The origin of these, like the origin of all our beliefs,
lies far back in the history of the race, and it is in this direction we
must look for a full answer to these and similar questions. The
danger, as I have had occasion to remark in another connection,
of interpreting these early histories from philological and other data
which the different languages, literatures, and customs supply, lies
in our tendency to transport the feelings and conceptions of the
present day into ancient forms of life and thought. It is a very
common thing to find meanings put into words, and interpretations
given of customs, which the former were not intended to convey

* Dr. M'Cosh.

58 REASON AND REVELATION.

and which the latter cannot bear. Words now used in a purely
moral sense have had, when occurring in early history and
literature, all or nearly all the modern notions of morality im-
ported into them by some modern interpreters, while in reality a
moral meaning, at least as we understand the term moral, may
not, unless in a very modified form, be actually in them originally,
the conception being chiefly and primarily a kosmical one. This,
probably, became afterwards in some cases cesthetio and only ultimate-
ly moral. In fact we have read primitive ethics, as we long dijl
primitive mythologies, by "reading into them our own moral ideas
and religious conceptions. This course of development of the
moral idea in the past, from the kosmical through the aesthetic to
the strictly ethical, corresponds with the general form of some
famous moral systems built upon the primitive base, viz., the idea
of symmetry in action. This is a prominent characteristic of
ancient Grecian life and moral thought, and we may take these
as typical. The mould, so to say, into which the Greeks threw the
elements that rank with us as moral was artistic ; and looked at in
this light, their systems of morality were not only well adapted to
attain the end designed, but were the natural expression of the
mental attitude of the nation. The characteristic we have mentioned
is evidently the formative principle of the wise man's character as
drawn by Aristotle, and his frequent allusion to the arts and his
analogical illustrations show how deeply this aspect of morality was
rooted in the mind of the great Grecian philosopher. It was a
wrong interpretation of this fact that made Hobbes say that the
Greek schools made " the rules of good and bad by their own liking
and disliking, and every one, on account of their diversity of taste,"
did what seemed "good in his own eyes," and that there was
" nothing more ignorant than Aristotle's ethics." Actions in the
Homeric age had scarcely advanced to the point of view here men-
tioned. We see throughout the Homeric poems a confusion of terms
vaguely and indifferently applied both to physical conditions and
moral character. The sense of conformity with kosmical experience,
with which, in the form and colour of external objects, men were
familiar, appears to be the prevailing light in which actions were
regarded. One standard was thought sufficient for both. Bight
and wrong were in this sense applied to the outward act, while the
merit or demerit of the agent was rarely felt. This explains much
that puzzles us in primitive moral life : that absence of remorse, and
general unscrnpulousness in publio and private life. Good and bad

THE PLACE OF CONSCIENCE IN REVELATION. 59

had at first a like double signification, and it was only after con-
siderable advancement in definiteness of observation and knowledge
that the two notions became separated. This union of sensible and
moral notions was inevitable in that phase of thought and personal
conception of the external world which gave birth to mythological
forms.

But how did the separation take place, and in what manner did
the ideas and sentiments of right and wrong, good and bad, come to
include the actions which they now include, and to excite feelings
towards the agent of merit and demerit, obligation and non-obliga-
tion ? Evidently, as we saw before, not by any law, internal or even
external, prior to the fact. Its genesis, as has been well remarked,
is that of a " decree after the fact."* The only objection that can
be brought against this mode of statement and the illustration which
follows is, that it takes a state of society, when moral ideas, must
have been well advanced, as the state in which they were first
originated, and is thus really, although perhaps not intentionally, a
legislative and governmental theory. It also, as shall be seen, gives
too great prominence to individual action and allows too little for
social forces. This decree after the fact, it is explained, signifies that
" an action has been committed, and the decision is made, not in
accordance with a law presupposed as existing prior to the action
itself, but a law is made at the moment of adjudication on the action
by a judge or judges thought in early times to be inspired," but
whom we would now call men of wisdom and clear discernment,
capable of foreseeing in some measure the consequences of an
action, that is, of discovering the connection between cause and
effect in moral relations. The principle is the very same as that
applied to relations in the physical world. The difference between
the two is only apparent, and arises from the equivocal use of the
word law, which means in morals, primarily a rule of action, and only
occasionally, and by some, the order of the occurrence of moral phe-
nomena, while in physics it has primarily the meaning of order in
events, and only occasionally, and by a few, the meaning of rule or
command. Scientifically, however, we speak in both cases, if both
are subject matter of science, of the laws of moral life and of physical
facts, meaning by that the method of sequence in which they are
both found, on investigation, to take place. Singularly enough, in
the moral relations we have been long supposed, after the manner of

* Main.

60 EEA80N AND REVELATION.

silk- worms, to uncoil this from some mysterious internal chamber
bnt why the thread that connects sensible antecedent and conse-
quent should not be similarly unravelled, it is hard to see. If the
laws of one set of occurrences are written within, why not the laws
of the other ? The connection we trace in both instances is really
and solely an act of mental perception exercised on external pheno-
mena.

A moral event, or series of events, come under our observation, or
we make inquiry concerning them, and after careful investigation
discover their relation to some other event ; a physical occurrence,
or series of occurrences, come under our observation, and after a
similar mental process we see their dependence on some previous
occurrence. We have arrived at the laws of these moral and sensi-
ble experiences, and, given the resultant, we can again determine the
conditions or the reverse. Other experiences accumulate and fall
under generalisations already formed, or supply material for new
generalisations. On both moral and physical science we may pro-
ceed to form a practical art corresponding to each, and thus apply
our generalised experiences to the conduct of life in various spheres
of activity. Thus arise rules of art and moral precepts ; and if
revelation is not held to be necessary for acquiring a knowledge of
the one, or if the knowledge acquired through the one be not, pro-
perly speaking, a spiritual revelation, we do not see the propriety of
ascribing a spiritually revealing power to the other. They give us
in each case the relations which our sensible faculties are fitted to
perceive, and not other relations. As an example of the growth of
morality take the most primitive form of life we can imagine, —
life where we find the selfish or egoistic element in full force,
where self-preservation is the motary impulse, and personal security
and comfort are all that is sought, and here we shall find the rude
germ of morality with the notion of right and wrong scarcely pre-
sent, or only so in the most personal and restricted sense. Merit
or demerit is uufelt, and there is no sense of obligation. Pain
and pleasure of the most simple and uncompounded form are the
standard of morals. Action is almost reflex. A natural object
that hurts or pleases the primitive man affects him as morally
as does the action of a human agent. At this point the savage
theory of the distinction between good and evil is, as has been re-
marked in a very concrete form, " If anybody took away my wife,
that would be bad ; if I take away some one else's wife, that would
be good." This mere personal feeling is extended by various cir-

i

THE PLACE OF CONSCIENCE IN REVELATION. 61

cumstances to other relations. Other sacred bonds lead to a much
more extended application of the terms. Within the limits of a
society of some kind, actions become classified on one side or the
other according to their effect upon the new relations, and at the
same time and by the same agencies the simple feelings of pleasure
and pain gain in richness and complexity. When society becomes
organised in even the crudest way, terror, formerly acting intermit-
tently, is felt as a constant restraining force, and certain actions are
abstained from because associated with the displeasure of neighbours,
or, if the society have a head, because associated with the displeasure
of the chief man, and consequent pain to the offender. By such
strict rule as may be supposed to exist in regard to some actions
seen by the community or the individual to be of vital importance,
and by such summary and dreadful temporary punishments as ac-
tually did exist, strengthened by-and-by, as the present life was
continued into the unseen and peopled with rulers, by the association
of a more prolonged punishment, and the high displeasure of ghostly
men, — by these means, and the personal feelings we have described, a
more exact discrimination of some actions as belonging to one class,
and of others as pertaining to another, would be manifested. At first,
as in all cognitions, these actions and classifications would be of the
simplest and most elementary nature, even as the personal and social
relations then were. But gradually, as relations increased in number
and complexity — as a given society advanced from the crude state of
independence we have mentioned, to one of comparative dependence on
some other society, actions would be lifted out of their merely personal
and tribal relations, and seen to be good or bad, not only as they were
associated with the approval or disapproval of the community, or of
individuals, and from their objective primitive accompaniments, but
from the consequences, advantageous or the reverse, which the actions
themselves produced in their extended relations. Men could not fail
to notice that some course of conduct was followed by effects detri-
mental to the individual, and dangerous to the tribe, or to those beyond
the tribe, while another course was followed by opposite results ;
and in this manner a wider classification, more abstract and general-
ised principles of actions, would be formulated, according as these
actions were beneficial or hurtful. The passage from personal plea-
sure or pain, to general wellbeing or the reverse, is the passage from
an individual to a more social condition of existence. Morality begins
in the egoistic form, and is mingled, by means of social feelings and
bonds of increasing variety, with altruistic elements. But these two

62 REASON AND REVELATION.

sources are not, to ultimate analysis, distinct. They are both capable
of reduction to the primitive elements of pleasure and pain. In the
first case, there is pleasure, say, associated with a certain action, viz.,
our own immediate pleasure, and pain with another action, viz., our
own immediate pain. In the second instance, the reduction is
similar ; only in it the pleasures and pains are those of others as
well as ourselves; the pleasures and pains of others being to us
their happiness and misery. These altruistic feelings need not be
considered artificial, as some are inclined to regard them. They
are the natural and spontaneous result of social relations and a fair
development of a being like man, who is gifted with social in-
stincts. To diminish natural capacities for the sake of a philo-
sophical theory is as vicious as to increase them by imaginary
faculties. .

The notions of good and evil, then, are, primitively considered,
identical with pleasure and pain, or generated originally by associa-
tion with pleasure and pain ; and virtue and vice, morally considered,
are, when analysed, matters of computation of pleasures and pains.
In deciding morally on an action, the process, traced to its final step,
is simply that of weighing the pleasures against the pains, or the
greater pleasures against the less; and the intelligent virtuous
man is he who prefers the greater to the less. The same process is
pursued in our approval or disapproval of the conduct of others.
This is really the only ultimately intelligible moral standard that we
can find for these general conceptions. If they are not referable to
these primarily, then they represent merely the arbitrarily enunciated
sentiments of various communities of men. But although we state
it thus, the standard is not so Bimple in reality, but is of the highest
complexity, involving, as we see, not only our own pleasures and
pains, and all that ministers to these, and is in anywise related to
them, but also the pleasures and pains of mankind, and whatever
affects their feelings of susceptibility. It is in operating through
this narrower or wider range of affections, that association has pro-
duced results so diverse in different communities, and in different
ages. For instance, in low states of culture, as we saw, men adverted
very little to the happiness or misery of others; and hence the
cruelties and barbarities practised in such conditions of life, hence
also the absence in savage tribes of what are peculiarly social vir-
tues, and which involve the complex relations of social life, and
imply a continuous experience in order to produce cohesion and co-
ordination among the different elements of the complex whole. In

THE PLACE OV 'CONSCIENCE IN REVELATION. 63

the first case, the association is mainly between actions, and their
consequences to the individual ; in the second, it is between the
actions of these individuals and the consequences of these actions
to others. And it is from this extended association that we now
hear so mnch of benevolence, justice, and other social virtues, and
also of the great Christian virtue of self-sacrifice, which on one side
is a personal quality, but on the other side is, really a social virtue,
and, despite the apparent paradox of the statement for an intuitive
philosopher, is the efflorescence of experimental morality, or, at least,
is more capable of being grafted on that theory than on any other.*
From performing actions because associated with our own happiness,
we come to perform them because associated with the happiness
of a wider and wider circle of the human family ; and from con*
demning actions that were hurtful to us as individuals, we reach
the more advanced stage of condemning them because hurtful to
society generally. That association, working through given relations,
produces this result, may be seen most clearly if we take the facts
furnished by the growth of international morality, which is, com-
paratively speaking, of very recent origin. In early times it was
entirely overlooked, simply because there was no felt consequence
between our conduct and the happiness or misery of those who were
beyond the community in which we lived ; or rather, there was
the strong belief that the happiness of our community was de-
pendent upon a course of conduct, cruel and ferocious in the ex-
treme, towards neighbouring communities. Each community stood
within its own boundaries, and regarded all beyond as enemies to
whom it owed, if it owed anything, the simple duty of extirpation.
It is only as the association between the general happiness and in-
dividual actions becomes confirmed by continual conjunctive experi-
ences, that codes of morality applicable to all nations, are recognised
and acted upon by mankind. This extension of the consequences
of actions has been, through the most gradual series of relations,
reaching from the animal attitude of tribe to tribe, to that ideal
contemplation of others as men and equals, to whom we have the
duties of virtue to perform, and the obligations of justice to fulfil.
We say ideal, because in modern society we have all the stages in
actual existence, and realise in action the narrowest conception of
moral relations far more frequently than the widest. Forces are at

• The spiritual element in self-sacrifice will be explained when we come to
speak of the relation of morality to Christianity.

64 REASON AND REVELATION.

work, however, and have been operating for some time, which will ul-
timately break down these barriers. Political and economical consid-
erations, scientific truths, and religions ideas, are fast founding a uni-
versal morality ; and although not always carried out, it is generally
considered theoretically as an axiom in morals that it is not right to
pursue one line of conduct towards a foreign nation and another and
opposite towards a fellow countryman. The idea of one grand com-
monwealth is rapidly spreading, paving the way for the recognition
of a universal brotherhood, which is the true bond of humanity, and
which the highest and widest form of social organisation can alone
condition, viz., that of a great confederation of nations based on
an equality of rights, which is the greatest generalisation of morality,
not as it is, but as it ought to be. Through commerce, and the in-
tercourse, and knowledge, and dependence that commercial relations
imply, through sympathy with every phase of culture, and by means
of the powerful forces already mentioned, we have come to learn
with Milton, that, "it is not distance that makes enmity, but enmity
that makes distance ; " that " he who keeps peace with me, near or
remote, of whatsoever nation, is to me, as far as all human civil
offices are concerned, an Englishman and a neighbour ; but if an
Englishman, forgetting all laws, human, civil, and religious, offend
against life and liberty, to him offended, and to the law on his behalf,
though born in the same womb, he is no better than a Saracen, a
Turk, a heathen.'* Nor is it merely that new relations as to the
consequences of actions become co-ordinated by widening experiences
frequently repeated, but relations not moral are associated with
those that are purely so. For instance, a deceitful action, not only
calls up in the mind of the mature man the consequences that will
inevitably follow, both personally and otherwise, from such an act; it
inspires other thoughts and feelings in addition, some of which may
be of an aesthetic nature, similar to those in earlier conceptions on
the same subject, such as meanness, crookedness, with many colla-
teral associations, general and individual. These mingle with the
moral feeling, and indeed become so fused with it, as to appear in-
soluble. The same may be said of nearly all the moral feelings.
Indeed, sometimes the impulse to actions or the restraining motive
may be chiefly of a non-moral kind. The predominance of the one
or the other element in the complex mental state will either be the
result of special association, or be occasioned by the characteristic
feature in the temperament of the individual, leading him to advert
to the one aspect of the action rather than the other. One man

THE PLACE OF CONSCIENCE IN REVELATION. 65

might refrain from murder from sheer disgust at the physical ac-
companiments, while another with feeble sensibilities in that direc-
tion wonld be constrained by what are looked npon as more strictly
moral feelings or sanctions. .

Bnt to come more closely to the meaning of morality, or that
which is generally held to constitute an action moral, viz., responsi-
bility or enforcement by punishment. As is often maintained in
regard to judgment of any kind, so it is asserted in regard to moral
judgments, that the principle of association, of which we have been
speaking, takes away that idea of responsibility for our actions which
some other theory is held as strengthening. So far is this from being
true, that it may, on the contrary, be shown that association is the
very principle that explains the origin of the feeling of responsibility
or liability to punishment. Dr. M'Cosh thinks he has settled this
point from his peculiar position when he says, that "the idea we have
of pain and the idea of deceit are different ; deceit meaning morally evil,
condemnable, deserving of pain, our consciousness being witness."
This is a witness which we may safely trust in the present instance,
only it is necessary to interrogate consciousness still further ; and a
very little cross examination indeed will convince us, that the two
ideas mentioned by Dr. M'Cosh are not so utterly dissimilar as he
affirms, since both, according to his own analysis, have the idea of
pain, and from this we can trace the development of the idea of
punishability or deserving of pain. The development is consequent
on the relations and experiences of life. The ideas of love and de-
serving of love, of hatred and deserving of hatred, of pain and
deserving of pain, like the economic ideas of wage and deserving of
it, and the physical ideas of reaping and deserving to reap, are no-
wise distinct in themselves. The difference between the first and
the second is simply a matter of generalisation. In certain circum-
stances, we conclude that pain, or love, or hatred, or reward, or
reaping, shall follow as a sequence to some antecedent or antecedents,
with which any one of these results has been frequently connected.
We say that a man who bestows time and labour and skill in his
business ought or deserves to get remuneration. That is, remun-
eration of which we have had experience already will, on the same
conjunction of events as formerly, be again experienced. The
strong imperative form in which we express moral sequence has
arisen in a great measure from the fact that in moral experiences we
have to deal with personalities, who thus formulate cause and effect.

It is at this stage that the educational theory, either as legislative

66 REASON AND REVELATION.

or otherwise, is most consonant to fact. By our earliest experi-
ences we are led to join pain, or punishment of some kind, with
forbidden actions, that is, with actions seen to be productive of
pain to others. When any such deed is committed, punishment
follows it, either actually or by threat, and this being constantly re-
peated in our own experience as well as in our observations of
those around us, there results from the law of repeated action be-
tween two sets of circumstances, specially impressive in each indi-
vidual case, the closest relationship, ending in an entire fusion of
the two. After this cohesion, we no sooner contemplate a prohibited
act than the notion of punishment arises along with it, or, more
exactly, the two notions arise simultaneously or apparently so.
There need be no special season of teaching, or special teacher, to
produce this intimate union. It is a relation and association pro-
duced immediately by the will of others in some position of author-
ity; but it is constantly strengthened in an almost unconscious
manner by means much less direct and formal.* Were a child
asked why such an action was deserving of punishment, it could
only point to the fact, that those who had authority had previously
punished it on the committal of the deed, and threatened punish- •
ment on future commissions, or that punishment, which means pain,
had been, in some way, set as a mark upon the action. The child
may afterwards for himself find reasons for such a conjunction of
punishment with bad actions ; but, in the meantime, the mere arbi-
trary and inexplicable union is sufficient, and in many minds that
have reached, according to years, an adult state, the association
has no other basis than the fact of such conjunction. Respon-
sibility is the relative notion of punishability, and like the latter,
instead of being, as is often supposed, a peculiar deliverance of an
a priori moral law, it is the result of our earliest, and most per-
sistently continuous experiences. This idea or feeling of respon-
sibility is universal. Its universality, however, does not spring from
the metaphysical conception of free will, but from the simple fact
that men everywhere are made to realise their responsibility through
liability to punishment, combined with the teachings imparted by
the natural result of certain actions, and, it may be, altogether inde-
pendent of human intervention. The extreme variability of this idea

* In reality, as Bouaseau insists, the best teacher would be the less direct and
formal inculcation of act and consequence — where the action is allowed, as much
as possible, to reach its result without the intervention of will.

THE PLACE OF CONSCIENCE IN REVELATION. 67

in different conditions of society, and among different men in the
same conditions, is merely what we should expect from variety of
moral experience and natural capacity.

The idea of duty, which is in some respects the positive side of
punishability, may be traced to a relation of pleasure with certain
acts, joined, no doubt, to a feeling of pain with their opposites. Per-
sonality, in the form of authoritative command or enactment, is a
very prominent element in the idea of duty as we now conceive it
The idea is not so primitive as that of punishability, nor can it be
so early impressed upon young and immature minds. It supposes a
certain advance in social life, and a much more complete organisa-
tion of national existence. Nomadic peoples might give us the re-
straining force of punishability ; but it is only when we come down
to established and well regulated communities that the impelling
power of duty attains, in moral life, anything like the form of a
crystallised moral conception. Men see generally what hurts much
sooner than what actually benefits them. Motives to abstain from
wrong doing are formed long before impulses to right action. The one
is the clumsy and tentative essays of pure empiricism, which is pe-
culiar to all original human action ; it is the mere struggle to maintain
moral existence. The other is the matured result of moral action ;
the effort to perfect and develop moral life. Legal codes show us
this primitive moral standpoint in a state of wonderful preservation.
Their fundamental idea is repression of evil, and they accordingly
emphasise deterrent influences. Christian morality, on the other
hand, is the highest type of morality. Its fundamental idea is as-
piration after the good and true, and it emphasises attractive in-
fluences. The one says, abstain from evil ; the other says, be per-
fect. Punishment is the watchword of the one; duty in the
religious form of love is the watchword of the other.

But the purely moral idea of duty, like that of punishability, is
founded on a relation of positive command with certain classes of
actions, and also on that of personal observation of these actions as
tending to the welfare of ourselves and others, both of which, on
repeated conjunctive experience, result in the feeling of obligation
to perform these deeds. Why the feeling of duty should be stronger
in regard to some actions than others, and more intense in some in-
dividuals than in others, may be owing to two varied associations.
In the first place, there may be associated, in the one case, a stronger
feeling that the happiness of others is specially dependent on the
action or actions in question ; and, in the second place, one man

p 2

68 REASON AND 2EVELATION.

may be more indifferent to, and partially ignorant or, the source
whence the feeling or idea of dnty emanates than another. If
the source has never been seen to rise above the personal concep-
tion in which it originated, the power of dnty as a motive will be
weak or strong according to the respect and awe in which the au-
thority that enforces it may be held. If the source has been re-
alised to be a rational one — inherent in the very constitution and
order of moral life, the motive power of duty will be more equable
in its action, and vary in force in different men in accordance with
some fundamental distinctions in their moral and intellectual nature.
Or, it may happen that among the various elements, of which we
have seen any given moral feeling or idea to be composed, some
elements of the group may obscure the feeling of duty or obligation,
by being more prominent in the one mind, than in the other — a
prominency which may be due, either to general experience, or idio-
syncrasy of character.

In a manner similar to that above described, there is produced
in us, by experience, tradition, education, and various other means,
that inward sanction and standard of action called conscience, or
the moral sense. We are told, however, that this, or indeed any
secondary derivation of conscience from a fusion of the entire feel-
ings excited by moral relations, is inconsistent with the fact that it
contains an imperative — an ought. It is on this, in a great mea-
sure, as we saw at the outset of this inquiry into the real nature of
the moral life in man, that the theory of moral experience as a form
of revelation, or quasi-revelation, is founded. But this aspect of
morals is sufficiently accounted for by what we have casually noticed
already, viz., the intense nature of the feelings in regard to the con-
sequences of these actions, and their supreme importance, socially
and individually, joined to the objective enforcement of them by
particular men, or by society in general, or by their observed natural
consequences. It may be said in reply to this, that the perfect moral
man does not perform' good deeds through fear of the sanctions of
the dread tribunal within, or the not less dread one without. And
this is true. But how is this moral state produced P Evidently
the persistence of the sanction, which at first compelled him,
associated with wrongdoing, and supported by the exercise of
intelligent observation, has bred in him, through frequency of
repeated action, an aversion, not simply as at first, to the effects of
the sanction as the mark of the wrong, but an aversion to the wrong
itself, that is, the moving cause is transferred from the one

THE PLACE OF CONSCIENCE IN REVELATION. 69

element in the associated feeling to the other. There is no very
wide step between abhorrence of a course of conduct, because it is
punishable, or somehow prohibited, and abhorrence of the course for
its own sake. It is a step which we see society constantly take.
Men who begin to act in a certain way from a regard to an outward
sanction often end by acting from love of the course itself. Be-
sides the transference of the association which I have noticed, the
very pursuance of a manner of life, from whatever motive it may
have originated, becomes ultimately, through long continuance,
pleasurable in itself. The reverse is often held to be the case. It
is said that if virtue originate in pleasure, and I suppose in pain too,
it can never be loved apart from pleasure or pain. The meaning
intended to be conveyed by such a statement is, that a result the
opposite of what I have been explaining, takes place, viz., that vir-
tue cannot, on the principle of association, be loved disinterestedly.
But do we not see daily how children who are virtuous, and love
virtue, because of the association of good habits with the feeling of
pleasure, and of bad with those of pain, come, thus, in the end to
love virtue, as we say, for itself? It is a dubious expression per-
haps to say that they learn to love it apart from pleasure ; for in all
action, and in that which is the perfect realisation of moral recti-
tude, there is an element of pleasure. A saintly Hebrew found his
delight in doing God's will ; and doing God's will is, in Christ, con-
sidered the summation of disinterestedness. In order that goodness
should be loved for its own sake, Plato thought that it must be
stripped of every other accompaniment. But in every theory of
action we cannot divorce the act from the mere joy felt in the exer-
cise of our powers when they are directed towards the attainment of
the highest ends. And the fact that these energies are moral makes
no difference in this respect. At this point disinterestedness and
pleasure are identical, in the sense, just explained, that virtue ori-
ginating in pleasure or pain, becomes disinterested through coalesc-
ing experiences, the result of association.

I have been thus explicit in my examination of the moral ele-
ments in man, on account of the statement so often made, that con-
science, or the laws it is supposed to deliver, are a revelation of God
to man. It has been made plain, I think, that what is considered
distinctively moral is natural in its source, and drawn from the re-
lations of life around us, while the truths of revelation, as we shall
afterwards find, are concerned primarily with other relations. In
the preceding examination, it has not been thought necessary to give

70 SEASON AND REVELATION.

anything like a psychology of morals, or to enumerate the various
ways in which moral relations are modified, whereby types of morality
and standards of action fluctuate. Among these influences doubt-
less stands, for us at least, the Christian religion, and the suscepti-
bilities to which it appeals — a subject which in moral systems has
not received the attention its importance demands. But the mode of
operation of our moral activities upon the facts presented in Chris-
tian life and character is essentially the same as the mode of its
operation elsewhere. Although quite convinced that, as spheres of
activity, the two are distinct, I am not prevented from conceiving
the one as affecting the other, as we shall afterwards see is actually
the case. The type of Christianity itself varies very much with the
morality and general civilisation of a people, advancing with their
advance, sinking with their degeneracy. And a similar interaction
may very well be supposed to take place, on the other side, between
religion and morals, in consequence of the complexion of the truths
of revealed religion, for which moral elements form a basis, but for
which the intellectual elements of our nature are likewise necessary.
Both, however, as conditions of revelation need not be sources of
it, and they have, as already shown, a far different development.
It never could be said of any progress in human thought that the
age could not have produced it, because every step in morals and in
science is the necessary sequel to some observed or observable ante-
cedent in the history of either. It is singularly true of Christianity,
as well as of the whole course of revealed religion, that at any stage
it may be said, the mere age alone could not have produced it. It is
always, as we shall see, conditioned by the times in many ways ;
but that which is most characteristic of it is not the outcome of a
series of events apprehensible by sense experience.

CHAPTER VI.

MIRACLE AND EXPERIENCE.

<( Die unsichtbare geistige Welt 1st nicht bios eine fur uns unsichtbare, sondern
eine iiberbaupt sinnlioh schlechthin unwahrnebmbare."

It may be asked, as is often done, If a spiritually revealing power be
denied to the conscience and the external world by natural and
sensible observation, are we not thrown back on some miraculous
means for bringing the spiritual within human perception P

From the conviction that nature, in the common sense experience
of man, is uniform in its action up to the sum of its highest general-
isations, all that can be concluded by the human intellect are the
kosmical forms of antecedent and consequent, or oT co-existence.
That a man or people be able to perceive what is beyond these, he
or they must have a knowledge of facts that transcend these experi-
ences, that is, in order that knowledge of a state or condition of
things other than that of which sensible affections tell him can
come to man, he must be affected by such a state. There must be
the objective conditions and the subjective affections, as in ordinary
sensible experience, somehow in relation to each other.

The principle on which Hume based his doctrine regarding
miracle is certainly the true induction from either mere natural or
moral experience. To say that any revelation from God of the
spiritual can come through these forms in their naturally constituted
order and by sensible perception, is, as Hume would say, to con-
tradict the universal experience of mankind, which is always with
him, as with us, the universal sense experience.

To say as some do, that nature herself can speak to our sensible
perception and its related faculties of an intelligence is contrary to
the verdict of those who best know her speech, who most have
studied her, and who have the widest acquaintance with her laws
and operations. The most instructive part of ancient thought and
of modern investigation — to the pure theist at least, is the conclusion
that both teach regarding the ultimate inferences that can be fairly
and honestly made from sensible observation of natural phenomena
— including under that expression the phenbmena presented by
man, whether as an individual, or as a continuous race. Hume

72 SEASON AND REVELATION.

so far from stating a new principle, only placed an old one in a
new relation. It would be absurd to deny the principle, and
equally absurd on his own ground, tbat is, on sensible experience
to deny its application. Nothing is credible which is contra-
dictory to experience or at variance with laws of nature is, as has
well been said, " the harmless proposition that whatever is con-
tradictory to a complete induction is incredible."* That this is,
philosophically, an heretical doctrine no man can affirm ; that it
is on religious grounds heretical, it would be unwise to maintain,
unless we are to hold that truth has not unity, which nearly
all agree in saying it must have. The fact is, that unless induc-
tion denied as credible the possibility of miracles, when opposed
to the completed generalisation of a uniform, and well verified
sensible experience, we are at a loss to see how the Divine could
have been brought near to man at the first. We say, at the first,
for it will appear in the course of our remarks, that the original
necessity of miracles may not be a constant condition of a spiritual
revelation, and that though at the beginning an evidence of the
Divine, and perhaps an indispensable testimony to its presence,
miracles may ultimately become unnecessary and even misleading.
This, however, has nothing to do with our question of a primal re-
velation, which became possible for man because occurrences were
discerned in the natural facts and historical events of the world,
inexplicable and incredible to a sense-given intelligence. We have
heard it said with reference to such a conception, and particularly
with reference to spiritual life among the Jews, that, in requiring
miracles as proof of the Divine, they showed themselves so obtuse,
that it was necessary, in a spiritual sense, " to thump them on the
back." But who does not see that the commencement of all know-
ledge is by a system of " thumping"? This is at some stages
nature's method of teaching, and lessons of another kind than nature
teaches need not necessarily be supposed to be conveyed in another
way. If men had been all their days familiar with nature only, as
we are now accustomed to view it, through scientific ideas, no know-
ledge could have come to them beyond what strict science teaches —
they never could have passed the barrier of secondary causes and
the relations of sensible things to each other. In order that the
idea of God might be brought home to {he human consciousness,
something more than the course of nature, in whatever division we

* J. S. Mill.

MIRACLE AND EXPERIENCE. 73

may choose to consider that course, was necessary, for it is not true,
as we have seen, that the idea of law, or the conception of design,
can give us a consciousness of the Divine in sensible phenomena.

If a spiritual revelation be a possible thing to all, and the most
sceptical minds have never gone so far as to deny its possibility,
it wonld appear that the mode of its manifestation must be that of
revelation through, what I call, miracle. Miracle, at least as opposed
to scientific observation and its results, is the fundamental conception
underlying revelation. Revelation accordingly, in its very conception
is separated from induction and is not subservient to its laws. It
does not come within its gauge of credibility. It is not that the
miraculous in its lowest conception, viz., its operation in nature, is
contradictory to a universal law of nature known as causation.
For when any one says that a miracle took place in a given instance,
he is not to be held as maintaining that antecedent and consequent
did not follow in such a case, but that the consequent did not
follow on account of some counteracting antecedent. A miracle is
no more, on this view of it (which, however, I am not careful to
support, as being by no means its distinguishing feature), than the
introduction of a new cause, and any dispute there can be in regard
to it is not so much respecting the adequacy of this new cause as
" concerning the existence of it in this particular instance." It
cannot be said that the miraculous is d, priori impossible, for in
regard to the question of revelation, for example, which is a form
of it, we cannot start with a denial of its possibility.

The dicta of science and religion on the question of the revela-
tion of the Divine through miracles have been each correct within
its own sphere of truth. It is for this reason that we can unhesita-
tingly accept the conclusion made out by Hume, that no evidence,
meaning testimony, according to logical estimation, can prove a
miracle. Bat to bring it to such a test is to mistake the nature of
the miraculous. And it is in doing this that Hume and almost all
since his time on both sides of the question have been in error. Mr.
Lecky (who restates Hume's argument in a form very slightly dif-
fering from the original), in his "History of European Morals" says,
" Miracles cannot be disproved but by observation, abstraction, and
induction. They, like fairies, disappear, and we conclude them to
be the fetish explanations of phenomena peculiar to the time. The
common error," he continues, " in treating of miracles is to confine
attention to the possibility of the fact and nature of the evidence ;
we should also notice the predisposition of men in certain stages

74 REASON AND REVELATION.

towards the miraculous, which makes an amount of evidence quite
sufficient to establish a natural fact altogether inadequate to establish
a supernatural one." And evidently in the same spirit, in his
" Rationalism " he says quite truly that the tendency now is " to
reject miraculous narratives," and again, in speaking of Christi-
anity, that the "idea of the miraculous, deemed once its prominent
characteristic, quivers now faintly through the mists of 1800 years."
This "altered condition of belief," as it is called, solves effectually
the question of miracles, without considering the arguments either
for or against. The experience of modern times drops them
naturally from the sum of experiences. This is precisely Hume's
position, and Mr. Lecky's remark, that " an amount of evidence
quite sufficient to establish a natural fact is altogether inadequate to
establish a supernatural one," is what we have been insisting on,
but with this addition — provided the evidence be of the same kind.
It is therefore necessary to point out in opposition to Mr. Lecky
that the idea of the possibility of a miracle, and the consideration of
the nature of its evidence were, if properly carried out, not so far
wrong, but were really the essential points in the question of miracles.
His analogy of fetish explanations of phenomena and fairies is not
quite happy. The fetish explanation so-called was a regular
primitive scientific explanation of sensible experiences. It has not
altogether disappeared, but still remains in a transition state in our
present mode of thought, which is the natural sequence of that early
method. Indeed " fetish explanation " is no peculiarity of any time,
but an imperfect form of rational explanation universally applicable,
and common to all times. Miracle, on the contrary, is the perception
of the Divine in nature, the spiritual in the sensible. It appeals
not to the sensible, but to the spiritual faculty of perception. The
consideration of the nature of the evidence therefore, is, as I have
said, imperative. The objective element of miracle such as revela-
tion, for example, being the manifestation of the supernatural in the
natural, cannot appeal to sensible experience because sensible ex-
perience could not be affected by the manifestation. Its only appeal
can be to the spiritual in man, which is the internal and subjective
element of all spiritual manifestation.

It is sometimes said that it is to the connection of physical causes
and kosmical order that we should look for evidences of the Divine
existence and perfections.* But this is both contradictory to the

Baden Powell.

MlfiACLE AND EXPERIENCE. 75

principles elsewhere laid down by this writer, and is, besides, contra-
dictory to the nature of the truth to be evidenced. We must, accord-
ing to Baden Powell, keep strictly to physical induction in physical
science, and in religions inquiry to what he calls moral proof, but we
ought never to confound the two ; and again he says, " when we follow
observation and induction we are led to science." But how, in this
case, can it be said that the evidence of natural religion depends on
physical knowledge, if all that physical investigation rigidly followed
out gives, as this writer says (and, as we think, says with truth), is
physical science, that is, an ordered knowledge of our sensible ex-
perience of external phenomena ? We cannot in this experience sur-
mount the intimations given to us from nature, but these intimations
are only the sensible affections created in us by the phenomena with-
out us, and which may be reduced to the two classes of succession
and co-existence. To base on these intimations of the senses argu-
ments for the existence of a world, and a state of things outside the
sensible sphere, can, I think, be demonstrated to be impossible.

It may be held as confirmed by common experience, at least as
never yet attained through mere sense experience, that between
" matter and spirit, visible and invisible, time and eternity, sense
and faith, the connection is not perceptible to human observation."
We push our researches to the extreme verge of nature, and those
who reach the farthest bound in this direction find themselves
abruptly stopped short, and, if quite ingenuous, they will confess
that in this line of inquiry they are stopped short, so far as they
know, by an immeasurable gulf, that separates the creature from the
Creator. It is quite possible, although an entirely different thing,
that when we have received this supreme spiritual idea, we may
find evidences confirmatory of, and consonant with, the reality of
such an idea in natural facts. But these are not the source of the
proof. It is only what we would expect, that an idea of such a na-
ture, once perceived, would be fruitful in its results, even in spheres
of truth which could not have evolved it. This in no way affects the
fact, however, that the spiritual is above all that science can teach
or induce primarily from the materials that nature supplies. It is
in a world which science cannot realise, simply because the objects
which compose that world are not presented to its view. Revelation
of the spiritual is essentially beyond the physical, outside its province,
and is not subject to its criteria. Miracle, which is an essential ele-
ment of all such revelation, is consequently outside the physical
sphere. In itself, it really does not consist in physical interruption,

76 SEASON AND REVELATION.

as is generally imagined, and cannot, therefore, conflict with physical
science. Physical science may judge it beyond its province, and in
doing so is true to its pursuits ; but it is false to the wide interests
of truth when it advances beyond the physical, and pronounces on
the general impossibility of miracle or revelation.

The true position of miracles has been lost sight of since the
argument entered the domain of science and philosophy. It is
not debatable on these grounds, but must be carried into the
region of spiritual experience. When it is urged in the philosophical
argument, " that the extreme case of a conflict between two sup-
posed laws of nature has probably never actually occurred, where in
the process of investigating both the laws, the true canons of
scientific induction had been kept in view, but if it did occur, it
must terminate in the total rejection of one of the supposed laws,
— it would prove, in short,- that there must be a flaw in the logical
process ; and if this be so, the supposed general truth is no truth at
all ; " and also, that " we cannot admit a proposition as a law of na-
ture and yet believe a fact in real contradiction to it ; we must dis-
believe the alleged fact, or believe that we were mistaken in admit-
ting the supposed law : " * it is so far necessary to reply, that we
need neither in some cases disbelieve the alleged fact, nor believe
that we were mistaken in the supposed law. I is true that the
logician on his principles of verification, and grounding himself on
the facts of a sensible consciousness, must, with a sensible fact and
a generalisation from sensible experience, do either the one or
other ; but any one basing his position on a true and complete view
of man, as a being with spiritual as well as sensible affections and
experiences, need not in the case of a miracle, which is the case
under consideration in the passage I have quoted, do either. For a
miracle is not necessarily anti-natural and contradictory to any law
of nature ; it is a Divine fact, perceptible by the spiritual conscious-
ness. The physicist may walk through nature and retrace the steps
of history, and in so doing reject the Divine elements that have
been found to be given through both to the spiritual consciousness of
man. He can only do so, however, by first of all rejecting the fact
of the consciousness of the Divine. For this is the point on which
everything turns in the controversy. It is not so much the denial
of the first facts that is of importance ; that is merely a consequence
of the general denial that man has not " the consciousness of a life

* J. S. Mill.

MIRACLE AND EXPERIENCE. 77

in God distinct from the consciousness of a life in the eternal world/ 1
and along with this, the denial also that he who is thus conscious, is
at the same time conscious, that his conception of God and the
Divine generally, is not received from the external world and its
sensible forms, but from God, who reveals Himself to the spiritual
perception in these and various ways. It is, however, held by some
theologians that although miracles are not subject to scientific con-
dition, they are primarily subject to historic evidence. But it would
be well to know what historic evidence includes. In reality, to
make miracles subject to historic evidence, you must ultimately bring
them to the test of that very method of scientific experiment of
which we have been speaking. It is not enough to say that
" historic facts belong to a sphere of their own and rest on their own
character and appropriate proof; " * for after it has been settled by
the evidence of those who witnessed a miracle, that they have re-
lated what they believe to be true, the event, considered as such, is
still liable to a further test. It might, for example, be held to be
the result of some other cause than that certified by the witnesses.
Besides, it may happen that the fact, in addition to being what is
called a contingent historical fact, can also be regarded in its phy-
sical aspect as a scientific fact ; and in this case, if it is to come
within the sphere of the laws of external phenomena, I cannot see
how the historian is at liberty to refuse to verify it. Most of the New
Testament miracles, for example, were mediated through what are
now understood to be scientific facts ; and if these miracles are
within the range of physical order, they must be equally true at all
times, and be constantly subject to revision. Although in historic
forms, they are in this instance records of scientific belief based
on the observation of the period to which they belong, and must be
judged according to all rules of fair verification in science, as, for
example, that any law received on what appears to be a full in-
duction, can only be rejected on equivalent evidence — that even an
historic assertion is not to be credited on any less evidence, than
what would suffice to overthrow the law to which the evidence re-
lates ; so that, as already noticed, the admission of pure historic evi-
dence comes in the last resort to the admission of a scientific test,
and what is more, " must lead us, if we are consistent, in accepting
all that is supported by creditable testimony." Looking at these
rules and facts, historic evidence is only a preliminary to scientific

* Principal Tulloch.

78 SEASON AND REVELATION.

verification, and is liable to the same objections, when applied as the
sole criterion of spiritual truth. It is incorrect in the sphere of re-
velation, and, as stated by those who uphold its authority in this
matter, it is not philosophical. It would not only deprive us of a
scientific test in sensible experience, but of a test in spiritual experi-
ence and Divine facts, while it leaves us at the mercy of witnesses
who cannot be interrogated, and from whom we can only protect
ourselves, if we are to be protected at all, by these indirect means.

Miracles, as a form of Divine revelation, cannot be brought within
the sphere of the natural, either through scientific experience or
historic testimony ; nor can it be antagonistic to it. The funda-
mental idea of miracle is not that of Divine interference with ordi-
nary events. We nowhere see this later conception of it in the
records of the New Testament. It is rather that of the Divine in
God manifesting itself to the Divine in man, by the mediation of
these natural events. It is an opening of the kingdom of God,
which no man can see, " except he is born again," as the spiritual
consciousness is paraphrased. Any manifestation whatsoever re-
quires a mode in which this may be accomplished ; and one of the
modes of the manifestation of which we are speaking is the external
world ; and this manifestation, quite as much as another, requires also
the necessary preliminary in all, viz., an enlightened perception, — in
the instance before us, an enlightened spiritual perception in those to
whom the revelation is made known : " Ye must be born again."

Miracle being thus a revelation of the Divine, it is quite probable
that if the savants, whom Renan would wish to witness the experi-
ment of the miracles repeated, saw the experiment, they would per-
ceive no more than the secondary causes. It is a mistake to go the
length of some, and maintain that the Divine could not now be thus
manifested. If this be the case, it is so because a more perfect
manifestation has superseded a less perfect. But however this may
be, in Christ's miracles, for example, the sensible facts were not
transformed in any non-natural manner. Secondary causes, for all
we can see, might still operate, and sensible results be all that was
apparent to the visual or tangible perception of the bystanders.
What was Divine in them could not be subjected to the critical and
scientific investigation of the savants or others, and could not be put
through their alembic It was unveiled to the spiritual gaze of men.
It is because men forget this view of them, which is Christ's and not
ours, that we have so many explanations — rational, e.g., which is
inevitable from the standpoint of common experience ; mythical and

MIRACLE AND EXPERIENCE. 79

legendary, which is a confusion of miracle with the mythological
development of science.

Miracles hare attained a signification which is decidedly modern
when they are conceived as the opposite of law, in the scientific
sense of that term — as produced by spasmodic Divine interposition.
Their basis is rather the idea that Divine action is the rule, and not
the exception. Miracle is not really a miracle to all minds ; it is
only so when it is considered as abnormal, and abnormal in being un-
perceived by ordinary observation. As the spiritual expression of a
Divine fact, it is considered by the spiritual consciousness to beany-
thing but abnormal. Take a case in illustration of what we mean,
and one cited by Dean Lyall in his " Propaedia Prophetica." The
destruction of Babylon, recorded by Herodotus, is a great historical
event whose causes we can investigate and perhaps reduce to some
sociological law ; at least, we could do so were we sufficiently ac-
quainted with the facts previous to, or contemporaneous with, the
event. In the Bible we see it under an entirely different aspect.
It appears there as a miracle, Dean Lyall says, " because the pro-
phecies which preceded it connected it with the immediate agency
of God." And the same writer concludes that for this reason it
was different from the destruction of Syracuse, etc. But this is
just the mistake of which I speak. Even if the one were predicted,
and the other not foreseen by man, we are not to conclude that both
were not equally known to God, although not alike foretold to man.
On the contrary, the conclusion to every one who accepts the fact of
the Divine is, that both were known to God, and that the spiritual
was in the one no less than in the other, although not unveiled.
Therefore, to the sensible intelligence, both would be miracles ; to
the Divine consciousness neither is miraculous. The event as fore-
told is not, properly speaking, different from the event apparently
occurring in ordinary natural sequence. In the first instance, the
only difference is, that to spiritual observation the secrets of nature
are laid bare, a Divine revelation is unfolded through her, the
spiritual side of her operations is manifested.

Christ's miracles may be regarded as in a manner predictive with
something added — they were what the writer in the Epistle to the
Hebrews calls " powers of the world to come," energies of a world
other than those of the natural. The same expressions are used by
the evangelists in speaking of Christ's work ; as, for example, when
they tell of " energy " going out of Him upon a multitude ; and
again, " Jesus, knowing in Himself that virtue (fivvapip) had gone

80 REASON AND REVELATION.

oat of Him, turned Him about. 1 ' We do not seek to define these
" powers (&vpdfi€is) of the world to come " further than that they
are spiritual manifestations ; but it is possible, that among other
things they may be, as we have said, a kind of prophecies of those
things that shall yet take place in the extended spiritual world that
is to be, veiled from us now, except for the fact of their Divine
nature, even as many of those prophecies that came of old were con-
cealed from the men of the time in which they were uttered. We
have intimations — we cannot well call them more — both in the Old
Testament and the New, that the spiritual elements and the material
throughout the whole creation round are linked together in such
close affinity that the introduction of a discordant principle in the
higher has worked itself out in unseen ways, but in visible and
certain results upon the lower, so that we may take literally the
statement of St. Paul, " the whole creation groaneth and travaileth
in pain together until now ; " and these miracles may be foreshadow-
ings of the deliverance of the material world — types of the coming
time of which Isaiah sung, when nature and man shall be in har-
mony, and given to us in measure in the time that now is, that we
" through patience and comfort of the Scripture might have hope."

But whatever importance may be attached to such expectations,
and whatever else the miracles of Christ may contain, they were
primarily the unveilings of the Divine ; and this fact, as we have
already said, the keenest physical perception could not see at the
time, nor can it see now. At first the Divine was not perceived by
many of Christ's own immediate followers, but only the " wonderful
work," the antecedent and the consequent — the sequence of events.
To outward observation nothing could be more natural than this.
But to those whose spiritual perception was strengthened, the Di-
vine in these natural facts shone forth. It was then made cognisable
to man that in these acts the Divine Word was revealing itself. The
veil of the natural, always visible, was withdrawn, and the spiritual,
that is generally invisible, was displayed, but only to the vision
fitted to behold it.

In the special revelation in Scripture, there is made known to
us a spiritual Being, who operates in our spiritual life and sphere,
and who in the history of man has discovered Himself working
through natural life. In miracles, men have seen by spiritual vision,
not by sensible (for in this way they cannot see these things), that
which is behind all natural events, whether in the external world or
n man or nations. This question of miracles is not one that should

MIRACLE AND EXPERIENCE. 81

be discussed on the individual miracles of the Old Testament or the
New. It should be tried on the general and decisive platform of a
revelation. Settled there, it settles the main difficulties of this
problem. If miracle be found impossible there, then we may dis-
card all others as inconsequent. If, on the contrary, it is found to
be essential there, the metaphysical, logical, and historical diffi-
culties, so far as our discussion is concerned, are of comparatively
little importance. And we can discuss this question on the ground
of experience, on which it has been raised. Hume's argument, on
its own basis, we found to be unanswerable. The answers that
have been given to it, have been acknowledged by most to be at
least unsatisfactory. But we can bring experience to attest, which
is the very thing that Hume desiderates. For what is the point in
dispute P Is it not that we have no experience of the operations of
other causes, or whatever else they may be called, than those that
produce the ordinary modifications in the sensible life of man ; that
we have sensation, perception, memory, belief, etc. ; that the outer
world affects us so and so, and that is all ? We cannot object to
this psychology. It is quite true as far as it goes, but it does not
go far enough. There is a higher psychological action, if we may
so speak, not independent of this, but over and above it, which is
likewise experienced by men, and of which the sensible psychology
gives no account. There are impressions produced upon men from
a sphere outside that of the visual, the tactual, or any other form
of the merely sensible sphere. In intercourse with the Christian
revelation, for instance, we have the immediate consciousness and
perception of something distinct from sensible experience, and which
constitutes an inner spiritual experience as real and individual and
disparate as that based upon our contact with the external universe.
And since we have this spiritual experience in any measure, the fact
that it may have been given in larger measure to some is easily
conceivable. But, at any rate, the fact remains that there is some-
thing such as we have tried to describe which affects us, and some-
thing in us capable of being thus affected — that this something does
not come within the ordinary sequence of intellectual observation ;
that the expression of it by the natural man and in sensible language
is the miraculous — the formula of the spiritual man, and in spiritual
language is the Divine. The present experiences of this sphere o(
being must be held as confirmatory of the experience of those who
enjoyed it in former times, and of the record of it which they have
left to us, even as the sensible experience of men of £he present day

o

82 REASON AND REVELATION 1 .

is confirmatory of past experience of the same order, which has led
to the conception of uniformity in natural life, as opposed to the
miraculous in spiritual life. These two constitute a twofold experi-
ence running parallel to one another — perhaps, more properly, form-
ing the warp and woof of man's complex existence.

The general reasoning on this question is based on what, in view
of man's constitution, we cannot but think a fatal presumption,
viz., that all truth is bound together in a linear series. The con-
ception is that of a gradation of sciences running into each other,
and culminating in the highest. If, however, we have experience
of a spiritual affection confirming the spiritual experience of former
times, — that is, a spiritual affection of our spiritual, or inner being,
distinct from an affection from outward things, — we have given us,
to use the most general language that we can think of, an operative
agency in the world that is distinct from sensible force — a cause, to
borrow a leading term from the vocabulary of science, which reveals
itself in our spiritual life, and is known, like other causes, by its
results or affections in ourselves, that is, known precisely as all facts
are known ; and this, we think, is all that is necessary for proof of
the existence of any fact. Given an operative spiritual power — we
say spiritual to distinguish it from sensible, and we use power in its
most abstract sense — given this operative power, and what can we
say about its operating or not operating upon the phenomena around
us ? Absolutely nothing. We know not the relation between mind
and matter, and as little need we expect to know the relation be-
tween spiritual life and matter. We cannot tell how matter affects
our spiritual state, nor how our mental affections act on matter ;
nor need we wonder at our ignorance of the modus operandi of
spiritual power. The fact that it is, settles, at all events the meta-
physical difficulty of the possibility or impossibility of its acting
or not acting. The experience that spiritual men have now, and
always have had, of a Divine affection, refutes the historical or
experimental objection of uniformity. The argument from human
testimony, and that from uniformity in nature, are at bottom really
one and the same, both being grounded on sensible experience, the
one individual, the other general. If it be said that men now- a- day a
have no experience of the Divine in nature, but, on the contrary, of
uniformity, may it not be replied, that it is not necessary, in order
to establish the operation of a cause, or the recurrence of any
phenomenon (I am here compelled for illustration to use the
language of science as the only intelligible phraseology), that every

MIRACLE AND EXPERIENCE. 83

person should have actual experience of the one or the other ? We
have not had experience of the unbroken uniformity of nature, be-
cause we have not known everything in nature ; yet we predicate
uniformity in the sensible world, because the experience of men
like constituted has hitherto been the same as our own. It is a
conclusion of our own experience, plus the experience of others,
both anterior and posterior to us, in the same sphere of experi-
ence. We could not each have the experience necessary for this
generalisation. We could not all have the experience of some
sensible events exceedingly uncommon, such, for example, as rare
celestial phenomena; but because these occurrences are unusual,
and, therefore, necessarily confined to the experience of a few, we
do not reject them. We accept them, because they fall in with our
general experience in that and other fields of experience. It is a
similar test that is needed in the case of miracle regarded as a
revelation of the Divine. We may not have experience of miracles
as they formerly occurred. They are rare, but they may agree
(and this is a matter for the spiritual consciousness to decide) with
our general experience of the same class of Divine events ; and if
we accept them, we do so, not as wonders in a spiritual sense, but
as concomitants of the general Divine consciousness. It may be
objected that we can account for physical facts, however rare their
occurrence may be, while no one pretends in the same way to
account for miracles. But it would be well to observe what this
accounting for amounts to. Is it not confessedly this, that a cer-
tain antecedent, or series of antecedents, precede a given occurrence,
and not that there was any real efficient cause P But is there not
proof equally good in the case of spiritual events ? Can we not
account for them by a spiritual antecedent, which, acting again in
like manner, will as inevitably produce the same results ? We are
not at present arguing on the supposition of a will operating in
nature, but of a spiritual manifestation through physical facts.
The idea of volition, which has been thought to account scientifically
for miracles on the platform of sensible experience, could never
have attained the importance, which, as a theory, it has gained with
some, had it not been for the widespread belief in the arbitrary
nature of volitional acts that lies at the foundation of it. The
order of nature may, for anything we know, be the result of the
constant exercise of will in that sphere of the Divine activity. Its
regularity does not hinder us from ascribing it to volition. . There
is nothing with which we are more accustomed in mental life than

G 2

1

84 REASON AND REVELATION.

a series of acts, dependent on volition, occurring regularly and
orderly, and, as some might erroneously conclude, instinctively, or,
at least, independent of will. Besides, in the case of events treated
constantly, both for philosophical and practical purposes, as the
products of volitional acts, viz., those of a sociological nature, we
postulate laws and find out general expressions for groups of facts,
and for their methods of occurrence, showing very plainly a convic-
tion, on our part, of regularity in voluntary as well as in involuntary
activities. If, accordingly, regularity and order be the expression
of will, it is impossible to bring in will likewise as the explanation
of what is termed irregularity and interruption. The instance of a
father with a child may serve as an example of what I mean. The
child can calculate upon the temper, and action, and behaviour, of
the father, which are yet volitional, and if the father behave at any
time in an apparently strange manner, such conduct will be found
to be, not arbitrary and uncaused, and preceded by no connecting
antecedent, but a natural sequence, as before, to some explicable cause.
Those who explain miracle, because of its apparent want of unifor-
mity, by volition, would require, in the first place, to prove that the
acts of the will are arbitrary and lawless ; a psychology which is not
only in itself open to dispute, but which, when taken in connection
with natural events, is not true to sensible experience. The voluntary
acts of men when exercised upon external nature, ought, according
to this psychology, to produce miraculous results, and yet in reality
they produce calculable and natural effects, as the daily work of every
man testifies. The former's tillage is quite volitional, but no mira-
culous consequence ensues ; and the sum of natural order everywhere
is the outcome of voluntary and involuntary action. The distinction
between voluntary and involuntary is not that of irregularity and
regularity, but merely that of some variety in the elements of con-
sciousness.

The explanation of miracles by the voluntative action of the
Deity, is really an explanation of a spiritual phenomenon by sensible
experience, and liable to all the general objections already stated
when criticising such explanations. On the other hand, it should be
observed by those who try only sensible explanations, that because
we hear of no miracles now, it is not legitimate to conclude against
them having been. Men, at present, question miracles as they
occurred in Christ's day, for example ; but it is surely not perfectly
ational, when this present non-belief is transferred to a different
time and other circumstances. The method thus pursued is erron-

MIRACLE AMD EXPERIENCE. 85

eons. We are not in the babit of saying that such a sensible phe-
nomenon could never be, at least no exact physicist would say so,
bat rather, given its accompaniments, let us see if it could be. It is
quite true that we cannot repeat Christ's age and life, neither can
we experiment with any historical era — with moral or spiritual
phenomena, as we can do with the elements of nature. The his-
torical is not cyclical like nature. I do not mean that nature is
cyclical in form, for it is ever diverse, but merely that it can be
treated as such, in the combination of parts on which science is
based. The side of nature that appeals to our sentiment of beauty,
as contrasted with that which appeals to our intellectual faculties,
and gives rise to scientific observation, is quite separable in thought.
Nature in this last relation may be experimented upon, and be made
to repeat herself. History both of what is spiritual and moral is, on
the contrary, progressive. We have not only to inquire, therefore,
about the occurrence of a phenomenon, but also about the type which
it would assume in a distant epoch under circumstances very unlike
the present. Bocks, we suppose, if we are to have a science of them,
were wasted and upheaved millions of years ago just as they are
now. The Divine, when the faculty in man for its perception was
in the merest rudimentary state, and unconsciousness, or something
approaching it, might fitly describe its condition, would be manifested
in a manner slightly different from its manifestations after further
development had been reached. The means by which the spiritual
startled man into the consciousness of its existence would not be
precisely the same, perhaps, as that, by which it might be alternately
sustained and strengthened in him. Mediated agencies might be
necessary at the first, which were afterwards found to be useless.
The spiritual in man might outgrow these early channels of Divine
communications, as we shall see in the course of development that
it did. His present means of life, even, may hereafter prove any-
thing but nourishment to the perfected spiritual man of the future*
As the boy grows, he outgrows what formerly ministered to his
intellectual nature. The man feels these early helps to be weights
instead of wings. That which taught the dawning spiritual power of
early men may have nothing to say to us, unless the bare fact, that
through it the Divine came home to these primitive men ; in other
words, the heart of its teaching, and not its form, may be what
remains. If we are to develop spiritually as well as mentally, a wider
world of spiritual truth is the inevitable condition of such advance-
ments. The " beggarly elements " are necessary as a preliminary,

86 REASON AND REVELATION.

because they have in them that which is essentially contained in the
highest principles ; but it is not necessary to rest in these elements.
The "schoolmaster," whether he be in the form of miracle, or written
authority, or plain enactment, must leave us if we are to come to
anything. He can only train us to a certain point, and after that,
experience, observation, and all the appliances of life, must be our
teachers. The possibility is, that we shall, as boys often enough do,
excel our "schoolmaster," and the likelihood in that case is, that the
"schoolmaster," even as the proud teacher, will rejoice in our
superiority. He brought us to our fuller, freer life, and made its
ultimate stages possible.

These early spiritual lessons of which I speak were the school-
masters to bring men to Christ. What may seem to us, now that we
are older, clumsy and external means, were used at school to aid our
early efforts ; whipping if necessary sometimes. And to Christians,
looking back from the glorious liberty of spiritual law and the
experiences of a life that is "hid with Christ in God," former
appliances in the spiritual school cannot but appear rude and
artificial; but they may have been, for the times they were used*
none the less real and effective. The appliances and the results
appear in fact to correspond. The idea of the Divine once familiar to
man will, like other ideas, be developed in many ways, and be after-
wards found in events and experiences that before seemed without
such an element, simply because the necessary cultivated spiritual
perception did not before exist; just as the man of keen powers
of sensible observation will find instances to confirm his conclusions
where, before his powers reached such a degree of keenness, he never
would have dreamed of looking for them. It is in this way that the
spiritual consciousness perceives in the regularity, and what are
called the laws of nature, an expression of the Divine. These laws
are not to it the ultimate results ; they do not sum up the whole
facts. There is an element, it is felt, that has escaped mere scientific
observation and is not subject to its test of variations, which, for
the spiritual man, cannot be thrown out by any scientific elimination,
nor, we may add, evolved by any amount of scientific observation.

It is on something like the volitional theory above described, that
Schleiermacher and others base their argument from certain con-
sequences that are supposed to follow the introduction of a new
element into the system of the universe. But the shining of re-
velation into the world-history need not necessarily be conceived, as
Schleiermacher conceives it in his representation of miracles. It

MIRACLE AND EXPERIENCE. 87

is perfectly true, as he says, that the governance of the world is
conducted under general laws, and that any result is produced by
the totality of the ultimate causes — that nothing is introduced into
the course of nature that would destroy its harmony. But we have
to know what that harmony is before we can say that it is dis-
turbed. Our ears may be at fault, and we may, in this way, take a
lower effect as a perfect result. Or it may be, that without de-
stroying the harmony, richer chords and finer tones are introduced
into the music of nature. It is quite possible, however, to draw
imaginary pictures, as some have done, of the effects of new causes
introduced into the sum of existent natural causes ; and these repre-
sentations are rendered all the more fictitious from the fact, that the
phraseology used, is deceptive. The shining forth, in these so-called
causes, of a new manifestation and order of life, need not be pro-
ductive of the extraordinary results thus pourtrayed. At least, we
can see the practical effects produced on civilisation, and morals, and
life in general by the introduction of revelation into our world ; but
these are not so discordant as we might be led from hypothesis
merely to believe they would be, and they become in themselves
calculable and appreciable when translated into ordinary action.
Besides, the action of the supernatural, or as we prefer to call it
the Divine, is to the spiritual man as normal as the action of the
natural or sensible to the scientific mind, and the response to it in
man's constitution is a normal action of that constitution. Indeed,
this is the characteristic feature of the Jewish and Christian
revelation. This is the mark of the Christian religion, and that
which separates it from other historical religions. Other religions
were limited in their origin. They issued from within — were in a
great measure subjective, and, in short, the reflex of the general
mental activities of different nationalities. They were the result
of special modes of thought, the expression of states of feeling.
The reality and normal character of the Christian revelation, resting
on a series of objective revelations as genuine as the manifestations
of external nature, and appealing to subjective spiritual elements
in man, fitted it for becoming as widespread and diffusive a light
to our spiritual nature as the light of the outer world is to our
sentient frame. It is all embracing ; it is a spiritual environment,
to which our spiritual being may, through prolonged experience,
correspond, with which it may ultimately harmonise as perfectly,
as our bodily organism tends to harmonise with, and respond to,
the elements in physical life.

CHAPTER VII,

THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SPIRITUAL FACIS.
" The lamp of the Lord is the soul of man."

This conclusion of the preceding chapter is flatly denied by those
who consider physical phenomena as the only facts known, or pos-
sible to be known, by man. The whole reasoning of those who
designate that which is beyond science and sense experience the
unknowable, and who represent spiritual knowledge as the poetical
or idealised conceptions of sense, is based upon two assumptions :
in the first place, that there is no such sphere of experience ; and
in the second place, that if there be, the Being who embraces in
Himself the sum of these experiences is so different from man, that
He could not reveal Himself to our race. The first negative, how-
ever, becomes positive in another form, being introduced under
cover of metaphysics ; in regard to the second, we have yet to learn
that the development of spiritual faculties may not be as real as
the development of what are commonly called moral and sensible
powers. The comparatively modern conception of evolution, which
is thought by some to explain the growth of those parts of our
constitution that correspond to the kingdoms of natural and moral
relations, is not without an apparent analogy in that sphere of our
being which corresponds to what, in later times, has received the
designation of the kingdom of heaven.

In sense experience and moral relations it is well known to
psychologists, that the range of sensibility in man to these relations
is very wide and varied, and proportioned to the integration of
sensible impressions conveyed from without, according to ascertained
mental laws. The necessary conditions of the growth of all such
faculties from the lowest to the highest state are the primordial
capacity of being affected, and the presence of objects exciting this
capacity. The first stage of this sensible consciousness in man
was, most probably, that which is now seen in very low orders of
life — a mere vague and indefinite response. The moral conscious-
ness came later, and is still much less precise and well-defined. The
spiritual consciousness was later still and less general, and to this

CONSCIOUSNESS OF SPIRITUAL FACTS. 89

day has only a limited development. The fact that its experiences
are questioned by some is significant of this. It may be said of
many of onr contemporaries, as is quite plain of many more in early
times, that their consciousness is a great blank on supersensuous
things. In the latter case the reason is not far to seek. No such
world had yet been unveiled to this higher consciousness to pro-
duce a motion on its undisturbed repose. If we can conceive such a
state, it is as if beings with potential senses, and mental perceptive
powers corresponding, were placed where no communication reached
«them from without — where no sun was felt shooting its rays of
light to touch the nerves of sight — where no object ever impinged
upon their tactile sensitivities — where no obstacle impeded their
muscular energies, and motion could not be discerned by any marks
of progression — where no sound, or, what would be the same thing,
where one unchanging note fell upon their ears — where no odour
irritated their nerves of smell, — where, in short, no external world
corresponded to, or met, the internal sensibilities. Imagine auch a
case as this ! Imagine sensible and percipient life in such relations,
and what would be the natural result ? What could such beings
understand by consciousness of sensible objects, as we now under-
stand the expression ? What could they know of perceptions as we
now know of them P Instead of the highly developed perceptive
powers which we now possess, and the fine and intricate rationalis-
ing processes of which we are now capable ; instead of the vast
fields of science which man through sensible perception of an ex-
ternal world has explored, there would be insensibility, irrationality
nescience. Nor is this a deduction from some assumed principle,
as may be supposed.

The development of life in every sphere has been a development
through the presence of those conditions which we have here con-
sidered absent. Besides, the representation which I have given, is
borne witness to from an opposite point of view, viz., from many
observed facts in the degeneration of life. There are known to na-
turalists, animals whose powers of sight are good when in favourable
conditions for their exercise, but who, by exclusion from the action
of light in some subterranean cavern, have been found, at least for
a considerable time after removal from that place, to be incapable
of receiving intimations through an organ which, to all outward
appearance, remained as perfect as before its exclusion from the
occasions of its activity. And there are instances in which faculties
through their non-exertion, or from absence of the means and oppor-

90 REASON AND REVELATION.

tunities for such exertion, have either become practically useless, or
have been changed to some allied organs, which have been more
frequently called into play. With facts like these before us in the
natural world, we need not be astonished, that the potential spiritual
consciousness of man, set amid what appealed strongly to the sen-
sible and moral capacities, with all traces of the spiritual absent,
if they had ever been there — or if you believe some, with only the
faintest shadowings of it lingering in the earth, — did not, in these
circumstances, grow. Even when the spiritual was revealed, judg-
ing from the analogical cases we have mentioned, it is no matter
of surprise that in many, instead of unfolding the capacity for
the Divine, it should only be changed into the allied faculties of
physical and moral sensitiveness merely. The attempt, often made
in the present day, to resolve the religious element in man, and its
sphere of manifestation, into questions within the domain, either of
science or metaphysical philosophy, is largely a result of the con-
tinuous activity of men in the latter directions, and their inactivity
in, and consequent insensibility to, what is Divine ; or of their
confusion of the indefinite movements of the spiritual conscious-
ness, with the more defined and persistent motions of ordinary
conscious experience. But, while holding that the spiritual con-
sciousness of man was weak, there is no reason to question the
fact, that in the spiritual nature of men of early times (as well as
in that of all of us) there were the possibilities of what was yet
undeveloped; just as in mental and moral life, however primi-
tive, we recognise any germinating faculty of the same order, no
matter how unlike its later growth it may be. But these pos-
sibilities of spiritual life-power had to be placed in a world of super-
sensuous or spiritual phenomena ; the consciousness of this sphere of
life had to be touched, as it were, by the objects of the supernatural.
Before this, the world's great heart lay insensible, or nearly so, to
all these things. Its Divine consciousness was, at best, only a
potentiality. But there were chords in it, undreamt of, whose vi-
brations were yet to awaken a new and strange experience in the
race. A world unseen and for ever invisible to sense, — not waiting,
as is imagined, the advance of science, — is to be revealed to man ; and
with that apocalypse there was to come, as its necessary concomitant,
an unveiling of the Divine consciousness in the human spirit. A
new creation is at hand, — for we shall see some reason to apprehend
that revelation is, in a profound sense, a creation, transcending in
design the vast material creation. A light is to arise upon our spirit*

CONSCIOUSNESS OF SPIRITUAL FACTS. 91

ual sphere, of which the light that heralded the work of creation
was but the symbol ; and by this " Son of Righteousness " there is to
be displayed to the Divine consciousness in man, the beauty and the
loveliness, the order and magnificence of a spiritual world, of which
the varied beauty of the sensible, is in a great measure the shadow.
The development of man is everywhere seen to be from the simple
to the more complex. First animal powers, then intellectual, then
moral, then spiritual, expanding as each new stage brings him within
the sweep of new relations. He had to be led through the vestibule
of the earthly and sensible to the abiding glory of the heavenly and
spiritual. He was learning for awhile the thoughts that the visible
and tangible could teach him through his sensible consciousness ; but
now he is to have revealed, through his consciousness of the Divine,
the thought of the spiritual and invisible. The fullest revelation of
this, and the greatest step in the evolution of the Divine consciousness
in man, was made through Christ, who came as appointed, in order-
that "the thoughts of many hearts" might be revealed. It is this
turning point in spiritual development that we have had specially
before us in our account of the spiritual capacity in man ; but, as we
shall see, this process of external manifestation and inner capacity
had been going on during what is commonly called the Jewish
dispensation, and conditioned the fuller manifestation in Christ.
The manifestation which we have seen that the world required for
the awakening of its spiritual consciousness, — the vivifying of its
faculties for the perception of the Divine, was supplied in the institu-
tions and teachings of that nation. This was the beginning of the
revelation of the invisible which aroused the first faint consciousness
of spiritual life, — a consciousness that gradually became strengthened
and co-ordinated as the time for the coming of the great Bevealer
drew near. It is by this conception, that, what have been called, the
moral and spiritual difficulties of the early development in the Old
Testament are to be explained. In reality, they are not difficulties
at all, but facts explicable enough. In the evolution of spiritual re-
velation, as in the evolution of anything else, the earlier and imma-
ture stages are not regarded as contradictory of the later and more
perfect, but explanatory of them. We would not, on this or kindred
subjects, consciously choose the line of argument not unfrequently
taken up, and reason " from what we might expect." We are not
doing so in the present case ; we are arguing from experience. We
confess always to some misgiving when a proposal is made, in the-
ology or elsewhere, to show that something or other, e.g., some alleged

92 SEASON AND REVELATION.

contradiction, is consistent with onr expectations and the character
of Divine revelation. The feet is, we cannot with any truth be said
to have any expectations on such a subject at all. The thing is
before us, and by projecting ourselves into a past time when no such
thing existed, we are naturally inclined to carry with us the ex-
pectations of what we have since realised : our prejudices prevent
us from making any attempt to improve upon it. Such a mode of
argument is very easy. We read of the actual, and call it for the
occasion the expectant, and then cry out, " How singular ! the very
thing we should have looked for ! "

The met of a power of spiritual discernment in man through an
awakened spiritual life is very clearly illustrated by Christ in the
conversation with Nicodemus, which has been already iocidentally
referred to. The whole scene, in which the truth there stated is set,
is full of instruction on the point under our consideration, and we
make no apology for introducing it, if it can aid us in exhibiting the
view of a twofold principle of the inner life in man, with an order
of truths corresponding to each.

The elevated teaching of Christ, combined with the miracles
worked by Him, had attracted and perplexed a Jewish ruler. This
was most natural. The singularity of the teaching has compelled
the attention and admiration of less observant men, and could not
fail to excite interest in a thoughtful mind like that of Nicodemus.
He is eager to account for this new Teacher, that is, to explain,
satisfactorily to himself, the appearance of a man apparently so
different from ordinary men. He had possibly tried many solutions
of this living enigma, just as we have seen many attempted solutions
of the abiding record of the enigma. Have we not heard of many
ways of accounting for, what some would call, this strange moral
phenomenon P and it is not unlikely that Nicodemus hit upon some
of our modern theories. Men's thoughts are, after all, not so
diverse in different periods and in widely separated countries. The
Jewish ruler in not quite a positive way as would seem, still,
however, in the only way accordant with the tendency of his mind,
answers the question that had been troubling him regarding the
nature, mission, and teaching of this great man. He replies that
He is sent from God, Divinely inspired, — a very common way of
accounting for anything unusual, and giving evidence, not ne-
cessarily of any real spiritual insight, but merely of a theological
turn of mind. The great man to whom this explanation of Himself
is given, being satisfied with the shallowness of such an answer, pro-

CONSCIOUSNESS OF SPIRITUAL FACTS. 93

claims a truth that staggers the master in Israel, and bewilders
him more than the sublime teaching and miracle working had done.
The order of spiritual truth is not nearly so perplexing a problem
to the sensible consciousness as the discovery of the faculty for its
perception. The truth is supposed to be capable of resolution into
legend or myth, but the fact of a spiritual consciousness outs at
the root of this very explanation. "You think," Christ says in
effect to Nicodemus, " that you have put your finger on the secret
of this new experience, that you have opened for yourself the door
into My kingdom; you imagine that the bare recognition of the
Teacher and worker of miracles as a noble, divine, inspired man is
all that is necessary in order to gain an entrance into the spiritual
kingdom ; you dream that carnal and sensible discernment, that in-
tellectual perception and moral belief, can realise the spiritual and
heavenly, but you have not solved this problem ; nor can you in
this way ever see My kingdom or Me, and oertainly oot in this way
can you enter My kingdom: 'you must be born again/" Like
men in general, Nicodemus begins to dispute this position; he is
in fact determined logically to settle the question, and he does so
in a manner apparently highly scientific and strictly logical. He
reduces the statement of Christ to an absurdity — from his standpoint
a very simple matter indeed ; but the misfortune for Nicodemus is,
that the truth is not subject to logical conditions, and is outside the
sphere of the mere sensible understanding. His argument is, in
the main, the argument we reviewed on the general question of
miracles, and which has become associated with later philosophy.
How can this be P How can a man be born when he is old P can he
enter a second time into his mother's womb and be born P How
can nature act thus, and reverse her operations P Must we not as-
sume as the basis for all our actions and speculations that nature
is uniform P * But this assertion regarding a new birth disturbs
all our calculations, it is contrary to the first axiom of reason in
the highest generalisation of experience; it is suicidal, as we
moderns would say; it is absurd, Nicodemus says. "Ye must be
born again"! Throw that into shape, and see the manifest contra-
diction ! Man is born, at first, naturally, by a well-known mode of
generation, and nature is uniform in her action ; therefore ' the
second birth must take place in the same mode of generation as the

* The statement of Nicodemus implies, although it does not exaotly formulate,
this modern oonoeption.

94 REASON AND REVELATION.

first, which we know is absurd. Some may think this exceedingly
clever, and be inclined to cry ont, Well done, Nicodemns ! We do
not think it so very clever. It looks a pretty piece of reasoning,
like many other pieces of reasoning on similar subjects and from the
same point of view, but it is logically even fallacious. It confounds
the natural with the spiritual, and renders the cod elusion inconse-
quent. Because natural laws and operations are so and so, it is
concluded that spiritual laws and operations must be the same.
Nicodemns, we see, is still moving among the carnal, the intel-
ligible, the visible ; the sensible and natural are all in all to him.
When first he is introduced to us, he is under the impression that
he has discerned the spiritual in the teacher and miracle worker ;
but it was a poor and feeble and outside discernment — a shadowy
intellectual perception — a kind of shock to his general consciousness
merely. It wanted vital power and genuine spiritual insight. He
is ignorant of the very elements of this sphere of knowledge. The
first stage in this new mode of perception is altogether a mystery to
Nicodemns ; and, accordingly, when he is met by a new truth in
this strange and, to him, inexplicable sphere of truth, he goes im-
mediately to his native and sensible perceptions and from these con-
cludes, as he no doubt thinks, wisely and intelligently, that this new
sphere is altogether impossible. He cannot, by any means, bring
its truthB within the compass of his understanding; they will
not for a moment bear comparison with sensible facts and natural
phenomena ; they are, in short, as men now keep repeating, far be-
yond all experience and all known observations, and how can they
be ? This great spiritual truth of the new birth, and it is only an
example of the body of truths to which it belongs, is something that
is not within the philosophical domain that Nicodemns has mapped
out for himself — something therefore of which he is sceptical. But,
we should very much like to ask any modern Nicodemns, for we
have not a few in these later days, did it never strike you that there
are many things beyond your philosophy besides this great spiritual
truth of which we have been speaking — many things not only be-
yond it, but many things of which it never dreamed P You go
about with your measuring rod, your many means of observation,
your scales of comparison ; and all surfaces you gauge, all visible
objects you note, all ponderable things you weigh, and call this alone
your philosophy. Have you ever dng a common weed and ques-
tioned it P What is the thing that you call life in that vegetable
product P You say it is a vortex in which molecules constantly

CONSCIOUSNESS OP SPIRITUAL PACTS. 95

enter and depart, and that while this movement exists, the body
lives. Bnt is this not merely a way of darkening " counsel by
words without knowledge " ? Is yonr explanation not very much a
poetical fancy. And even poetically considered, does it include
that feeling of quiet which comes to us from nature ? The peace
of the still pastures in the lonely vales ; the solemn trees in far-
away primeval forests ; the hushed and serrated array of bearded
corn upon our harvest fields ; the imaged death of man and beast
in the depth of midnight : are these and countless other modes of
life,—

" The hush among the shining stars,
The calm upon the moonlight sea/'

well represented by vortices attracting and repelling ? You have
analysed your mental acts doubtless, as men like Nicodemus generally
do, and have, I feel persuaded, observed much for your philosophy ;
but what is the mental power or whatever else you may call it, from
which these acts proceed ? What is the last element in thought ?
What is its life, its vital energy ? Vortices again, playing through
nervous channels ? You have heard the summer wind (Christ's own
illustration) breathe, as it swept along ; you have seen the trees
and shrubs and lowly flowers bend down before an unseen power
which their quicker sympathy seemed alone to feel — a presence every-
where that played about in the warm air in sportive waves, and
now, as I write, you may hear it gently murmuring in its ceaseless
motion, scarcely "louder than an insect's hum;" and you have
noted some of its manifestations for your philosophy : but whence
does it come, and whither does it go P It would seem that your
philosophy is, in the main, an inarticulate utterance only of what
you but faintly and partially comprehend — that by far the deepest
and most fundamental things are still unobserved or unobservable
by it — that there is much more in the world than philosophy contains
that, very probably, there is that more, which, if known, would
banish a great deal of existing philosophy from men's minds. We
come, with the mere intellect and senses, to see a spiritual kingdom,
and question the very first condition for beholding it. We doubt
its testimony as Nicodemus doubted Christ's testimony, because our
limited sense experience and feeble powers of observation do not
confirm it, as if its testimony needed any confirmation but the re-
sponse of the adapted faculty to the spiritual that is within us.
Whoever asked confirmation of the testimony to the existence of the
light of common day beyond its own clear action on the senses

96 REASON AND REVELATION.

which it affects P Philosophical investigation of external existence
is not a questioning of light and other outer facts ; it is only an
attempt to formulate, or construe them to the intelligence. But
spiritual facts are supposed to require something more than their
existence and action to recommend themselves ; as if anything conld
be half so convincing as the fact itself. There is, at the bottom of
such a spirit, a lack of simplicity, a want of child-like humility,
which is needed in dealing with spiritual phenomena, as well as in
dealing with scientific, as both Christ and Bacon knew from their
own profound experience. Over the portals of the kingdom of
spirit and the kingdom of nature alike is written, "Whosoever
shall not receive " them "as a little child shall in no wise enter
therein." The treatment of Nicodemus by Christ is an illustration
of this. Nicodemus came puffed up with the idea that all know-
ledge, even that of this new kingdom, was open to his gaze, and he
was shown that earthly things were far enough away from his per-
ception. How then, Christ says, can yon flatter yourself that
heavenly things are within your ken? "If I have told you earthly
things, and ye believe not, how shall you believe, if I tell you of
heavenly things P "

The attempt to enter the spiritual sphere by intellectual force,
and to compel others to enter by the same agency, is not confined
to seekers after the spiritual, but has been too much distinctive of
the professed followers of Christ. They have relied, almost whoDy,
on arguments and appeals to the reason of man, and have failed to
excite the spiritual instincts. They have been wasting their strength
in an attempt as vain as that of trying to convince by demonstration,
a man with a sense of hearing, but no sense of sight, that there is
such a thing as colour. They seem only to care to bring men to
Christ, spiritually speaking, in a midnight darkness, with the ac-
knowledgment that he is a God-sent teacher and Divine miracle
worker. But Christ's answer to all such is, You mistake Me, and My
kingdom. My kingdom is purely spiritual, and can only, therefore,
be spiritually discerned. It is not, in the common usage of the
term, demonstrable. The only form of life that can find direct sus-
tenance and its proper sphere there, is a life in God's Spirit. The
Spirit that informed the deep of the external world, and made it in-
stinct with life, must inform our dark and confused spiritual con-
sciousness, and bring light and order into it by stirring the faint
pulsations of its life. The religious conception of the action of the
Spirit does not confine it to what is distinctively known as the

CONSCIOUSNESS OF SPIRITUAL PACTS. 97

spiritual life in man ; it perceives it to be extended to every realm
of life; its conception of it is that of one Spirit with many modes, —

" An active Principle : — howe'er removed
From sense and observation, which subsists
In all things, in all natures ;
... the Soul of all the worlds."

This perception of the spiritual everywhere is the Divine in man
perceiving the Divine without him, and is subsequent to the dawn-
ing of the new birth, as we shall see more in detail afterwards.
Although hidden, the action of the Spirit is everywhere ; but it is
a mistake to conceive it as everywhere alike, as Nicodemus, and
many others since, have done. The Spirit of the universe, of which
the poet speaks, has, if not its more intimate home in the breast
of man, at least a different unfolding there than elsewhere. And
so this new birth is not after the carnal creation that Nicodemus
supposed, although perhaps resembling it in many ways. This mere
sensible idea of it, however, if it could be realised, would be a boon
to many a heart. For what man or woman is there who does not
in the best moods of his or her existence long for this return to
other and earlier and fresher days P Who is there, for example,
who would not occasionally be glad to exchange the experience of
age for the simplicity of childhood ; to forego the knowledge of good
and evil for the quiet innocence that accompanies tender years; to
barter the hard independence of manhood for the trusting, unsus-
pecting confidence of childhood P Who would not get back if they
could sometimes that sunny season of gladsome days, the time

. . . " when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
. . . did seem

Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream " T

Who would not shut their eyes to this "light of common day,"
in which all men and women live, and open them on the " heaven
that lies about us in our infancy." Not exactly thus, however,
as we said, is the Spirit birth or the strengthening of the Divine
consciousness in man, yet not entirely withont its resemblance. It
means certainly an awakening of spiritual faculties, in order that all
the influences of the world for which they are adapted may flow in
upon them. Born of God in the Spirit, those who are the subjects of
this birth have the image of their Father on their souls, and lie, as
children should, in unquestioning confidence in His arms. With this

H

98 SEASON AND REVELATION.

awakened perception we have heaven about us, and the Divine near
us, in a truer sense than the childhood of the world ever had. By
it we are enabled to see the spiritual world as really and truly as we
now see the earthly. Our spirits are open to higher strains and
finer harmonies. Through this life, as it grows and strengthens, we
shall receive spiritual impressions, enlarging our faculties, and there-
with expanding our knowledge of the spiritual sphere, of God, of
heaven, of eternity. How this new birth or Divine consciousness
is produced, and when it was first manifested, we do not profess to
know, any more than we pretend philosophically to understand how
vital influence is given to our own and other bodies. But we know
the facts concerning both ; we are certain, that as there is in what
we call nature an unseen but felt power which spreads life and
beauty around us and manifests itself through the lives which it has
formed, even so in the spiritual kingdom there is this higher in*
fluence moving among the spirits of men, and here and there bending
before its invisible presence the souls which it has born anew. We
do not pretend to describe its action, or trace its movements, but
we with others are conscious of these " quickening, animating in-
fluences on all sides as of a holy world throughout governed by
supernatural powers." These influences are, as might be expected,
most abiding, and direct, and impressive when we " cross the thresh-
old " of the Book that records the unfolding, in one nation, of this
sphere to man. It is here naturally that we feel brought into the
more immediate presence of the Divine, although the influence is by
no means limited to it, and may even in other manifestations some-
times surpass what we find there. We know also from the Bible,
what we feel in experience, that the new life of holiness by faith in
our spirits is capable of rising to heights of spiritual perfection
hitherto unattained by ourselves or those before us in the same
order of experiences. With unknown ages before us, of which the
geological past may help us to form some dim and approximate
idea — with unknown higher spiritual influences in that measureless
expanse in our religious life, which developing life everywhere now
faintly discloses, — I am persuaded that it is no dream to cherish the
hope of the fullest development of this Divine consciousness, that
it is no vain desire to long for the great ideal of all life, to be perfect
as our Father in heaven is perfect. As this is the hope of the
living, so is it the grandest " doom we can imagine for the mighty
dead." We are quite aware that this consciousness of the spiritual,
or, as we have termed it, the new birth, which lies at the very basis

;

• *

«...

CONSCIOUSNESS OF SPIRITUAL FACTS. ' 99

of spiritual truth (whether in Scripture or elsewhere), even as the
Being towards whom we aspire forms its apex, is questioned by
many, and proof demanded of the certainty of these things. To
him who has not this certainty in himself, I confess I can find no
fitter words, in addition to what has already been said, in which to
state this certainty, than the following : — " Soil denn der geistig
Geheilte oder wenigstens in die Heilung Eingetretene nicht eben
so unmittelbar, ohne irgend welche Beweisfuhrung, zwischen Krank-
heit und Gesundheit unterscheiden und seine Gesundheit fuhlen,
wie der korperlich Geheilte oder doch in der entschiodenen Becon-
valescenz Begriffene es thut ? Welche Vorstellung von der Prom-
migkeit liegt doch iiberhaupt dem gegnerischen Baisonnement zu
Grande ! 1st sie denn nicht ihrem Wesen nach unmittelbare Selbst-
gewissheit? Bezeugt sich denn nicht das Gottliche selbst dem
Empfanglichen unmittelbar als solches, und ist nicht eben nur die
auf solchem Selbstzeugniss desselben beruhende Gewissheit die
voile religiose Gewissheit ? Das wirklich gottliche Leben ist als
das schlechthin wahre und reelle Leben auch seiner Beahtat sich
bewusst."*

In treating of spiritual truth, under whatever form, we cannot
advance one step unless we are agreed upon the conditions of dis-
cussion, viz., the nature of the truth, and the mode of its perception.
To those who really feel no consciousness, or only the vaguest percep-
tion, of the Divine, and to those who may have it faintly but have not
sought to quicken it by contact with the sphere of its action, this
chapter may seem the expression of emotion, rather than of experi-
ence. To those who feel a capacity for perceiving the truth we call
spiritual, the emotion, if it please any one to call it so, will be felt
to mirror the nature of the experience, and to be repressed rather
than exaggerated. In eesthetics Schiller says, we need " a heart
which feels, and puts in force, the whole power of the beautiful ; "
and in spiritual truths also we must have a capacity — a Divine con-
sciousness or spiritual susceptibility, since it is so necessary at every
step to appeal to experience and feeling, rather than to general
principles. The task may be simple and effective, or severe and
useless, as we have, or have not such internal faculty to respond to
this appeal. This has ever been the supreme difficulty in all re-
ligious questions which were deeper than bare dogma, and touched
vital spiritual existences. We may get a response when the life is

Bothe. »° ~ ~*9

e tt r«

* J

h 2

100 REASON AND REVELATION.

there, but we cannot inspire the life if it is so feeble, and inoperative,
as to be practically unconscious. And this spiritual unconsciousness
arises mainly from the fact that we will not come to Him that we
might have life, or having it, have it more abundantly.

We do not seek by these remarks to judge others and their
spiritual and intellectual position ; we state merely the general
condition of internal spiritual development. The causes why these
conditions are inoperative, we dare not seek to determine. The
known complexities of physical and mental life within the domain
of observed phenomena, would hinder any one from rudely and
ignorantly dogmatising upon mental and moral conditions; but
when we add to these the action of the spiritual life with which
the moral and intellectual states are closely allied, he would be a
rash man, not to say uncharitable, who would trespass the bounds
of general observation and enter the domain of personal experience.
Harsh judgments are much easier, less true, and when true, if they
ever chance to be so, less edifying, than dispassionate and affec-
tionate statements of truth. Truth, whether in spiritual matters
or physical, is never personal ; when pure and purely held it has
ever the note of universality. It is the admixture of error that
makes it limiting, and particular, and personal ; and this is the
manner in which we are all too apt to hold our grain of truth, and
the reason why our statement of it is so exceedingly individual
and bitter. The more nearly we approach Him who was "the
truth," the more will we be filled with that charity which is
the bond of perfectness, and which beareth all things, believeth
all things, hopeth all things. I scarcely expect that we shall then
have a division in our science of theology, or knowledge of the
spiritual, assigned to polemics.

• •• • •

• • ••• „-. • .

- : * . . • •

* to • to •

CHAPTER VIII.

THE MANIFESTATION OP SPIRITUAL TRUTH.

" One principal feature in the characteristic religious activity of the Holy Scrip-
tures is, that it transports us in a distinot manner into the historic facts of the
Divine revelation itself."

The general idea of a revelation being, as we have seen in a pre-
vious chapter, the unveiling of the Divine through spiritual facts
made luminous in the ordinary coarse of events, whether in nature
or in history, and these requiring in man for their apprehension a
receptivity which I have called for the sake of distinction a spiritual
consciousness, we are led, so far as analogy can lead us, to antici-
pate a gradual devolopment, both in the external revelation and in
the internal capacity. Revelations could only be given as men were
fitted to receive them. This statement must not be stretched too
far. It is not meant to convey an opinion, for instance, that the
earlier revelations were known absolutely in their entire compass at
the very first. They could, in fact, only be known by degrees, as the
awakening spiritual consciousness attained vigour and insight. As
we know from experience in other forms of truth, spiritual truths
already known in consciousness would be dependent on truths not
yet presented, and in this way the comprehension of a truth already
in presentation would be postponed. Later revelations were not
always grasped in an adequate manner when uttered, nor are they
even now clearly realised by the enlightened spiritual consciousness.
On the contrary it is not difficult to see that many of them are ab-
solutely misapprehended. In the Bible record a process, which we
found to be at the basis of our conception of spiritual life and a
spiritual sphere, is plainly seen to be begun and carried on, viz.,
that of exciting activity in the spirit of man, — of unfolding and
purifying his consciousness for the perception of the Divine mani-
festation. The method of God with man was essentially that
enunciated by Leasing. The primitive revelation stood to man in
the same relation that education stands to the individual. It was an
education in the spiritual. But, while Lessing conceived truly the
method and nature of the earlier revelation, the conclusions drawn
by him from this fundamental conception were erroneous. He

102 SEASON AND REVELATION.

failed, we think, to realise the double element in man's constitution,
corresponding to the twofold sphere outside of him, and the dis-
tinctive, and in some respects independent, character of these
elements. The relation of sensible life to sensible phenomena is not
the same as the relation of the spiritual life to what is Divine. It is
true that we speak of consciousness in connection with both, but
this is merely the most general expression for the primordial
internal state produced in each case : we do not pretend by it to
describe in detail the mode in which we stand related to that which
produces this state. Through sensible consciousness, when developed
as we now see it, we gain a knowledge of the relations of one thing
to another in the world of sensible phenomena ; in spiritual con-
sciousness, as addressed through revelation, we are lifted out of the
sphere of generalised relations into personal contact with One who
transcends these relations, but whom their most comprehensive
expression cannot touch. Personal union with the Divine is widely
apart in many ways from phenomenal experience ; just as, in a less
complete manner, personal union with humanity, in emotion, and
intellect, and moral sensibility, would be different from experience
of these, if we could have such experience, existing in some ex-
ternal material manifestation, and severed from all personality.
The fact that an education was needed by man through revelation,
as Leasing himself seems in one way to allow, might have led him,
one would think, to consider that there was something special
requiring this special means. Instead of this, however, he concludes
that revelation being an education, and education giving nothing
which might not be educed by man, the truths of revelation might
be attained by reason, independent of all special manifestation, but
that revelation enabled man to reach them much earlier. The
mistake in the conclusion is rendered all the more patent from the
fact that it is drawn, not from the primary conception of revelation,
but from the bare etymological meaning of education. In using
such a comparison, it is necessary to distinguish ^between God edu-
cating and man educating ; the one not only presiding over the
process, but supplying the material ; the other directing the process
merely. Paul expresses the idea better, perhaps, than Lessing, and
without carrying the comparison to an extreme, as there is always a
danger of doing in any analogy, when he calls the law, the school-
master to bring us unto Christ. It was the purpose of this school-
master to awaken in the spirits of his pupils the consciousness of
the Divine, and to do this synchronously with the development of

THE MANIFESTATION OP SPIRITUAL TBUTH. 103

the capacity to receive it. This primitive schoolmaster would have
failed entirely of his purpose, had he, as Leasing puts it, hurried his
pupil beyond the stage he had reached at any given time. From
the constitution of man, and from the nature of the revelation, as
well as from analogous processes in other modes of life, we can regard
revelation in the light of an evolution of the Divine. And this is,
perhaps, even better than to regard it as an education. The only
platform on which, of course, this was possible to man was on the
platform of the natural ; the mode in which it was practicable was
by the weaving of the supernatural through the natural. Revelation
is, therefore, a supernatural history with a natural basis. The dis-
tinction between Biblical history and other history, and between the
Jewish people and other peoples, is that their history and nationality
are not to be wholly explained by the sequence of natural events,
but by natural sequence together with the supernatural or the Divine
in these events, and perceived to be in them. History by itself,
as I shall have occasion more fully to notice, cannot give us the
Divine any more than nature or conscience can do so. For this
there was needed something more than the course of social and
moral phenomena. There was needed that which is really the essence
of Jewish history — the Divine manifested in social and moral events,
and the cultivation of a faculty to recognise this manifestation.

We cannot, at the present day, get at the first movement of
spiritual life among this people. The first stage in any form of life
is imperceptible to us. In life generally we see results not pro-
cesses. There is an embryonic stage in social as well as in indi-
vidual life. When social life emerges from this, it is hardly
possible to trace it back to its original state. Tradition has made
this original state its own, and the interpretation of tradition is the
hardest problem for the investigator in religious, social, or moral
questions.

Our first introduction to the Jewish people through their litera-
ture exhibits them as a people with the spiritual element of their
nature considerably developed. They appear before us, at the very
beginning of their history, with a vivid spiritual perception. That
is the reason why their first word of explanation about the world
and man is God. They looked into the sphere of nature, and the
light " which lighteth every man," but which in them was unusually
clear and bright, discerned the Divine there ; and, thus, at the very
threshold we get the key which opens to us the many chambers
that compose this beautiful structure of Divine truth, viz., God.

104 REASON AND REVELATION.

This is the note that distinguishes Jewish life and character, and
it stands most appropriately in the forefront of their religions litera-
ture.* Other peoples had, perhaps, keener perceptive faculties for
the experiences of ordinary life, much greater powers of observation
and generalisation; but to the Jews belonged the marked feature of
spiritual intuition.

The attempted explanation of the vigour and purity of the
spiritual life among the Jews by linguistic peculiarities has been
already implicitly considered in the chapter on mythology and kos-
mical revelation. If the account there given be correct, language
must have been itself determined primarily by mental and spiritual
forces. It is an expression of internal experience in the first place,
and is modified by the nature of that experience before it can in turn
modify the mental or spiritual life. The singularity in the features
of the language of the Jews was fixed by the character of their
minds. Its concreteness tells us principally of their ordinary bent
of intellect, and only in quite a secondary sense can it be said to
have confirmed this mental attitude. We mould our words by our
modes of thought before our thoughts are despotically controlled
by our words. In fact, language must be in a considerable state of
development before it can attain this supposed informing influence
upon our conceptions. The reason why the structure of the Jewish
language is so simple is, because the ideas of the people were likewise
simple. That the root meanings of words have not the tendency,
seen in some other languages, to disappear in derivative significations
is owing to the comparative absence of generalisation on the experi-
ences of sense among those who used the language. They were ever
concrete in thought, and the language of their religious literature
corresponds to this, and is the outcome of a similar characteristic in
their spiritual experiences. Their realisation of the Divine, whether
in nature or in history, was the realisation of something personal in
both. There is little that is abstract or metaphysical in it It had
from the first a strength and distinctness that has never been seen
in any Aryan nation. The conception of the Divine by Aryan peo-
ples soon became vague, indefinite, and undistinguished — if ever
it was very clearly distinguished — from the experiences of sensible
life, and so it readily clothed itself in the forms of language which
this life supplied, and thus became more and more confused and
mingled with these perceptions. Language contributed to this re-

n

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth," etc.

THE MANIFESTATION OF SPIRITUAL TRUTH. 105

suit, but only so far as the conceptions which the language embodied
were radically distinct. The language did not hinder some branches
of the Semitic people from following the same course in spiritual
life that was followed by the Aryan peoples. It did not prevent
large sections of the Jews themselves from lapsing frequently into
a haziness of spiritual perception. It is only in their representative
men that we see the ideal of the spiritual life which the nation
typified, as it was by these men that the nation was again and again
recalled to the consciousness of the Divine hand in all things — to
the fact that this and this was the Lord's doing, — a testimony and a
point of vision which constituted for them and us what we know by
the name of revelation. They were a people whose crowning glory,
we can well see, was the fact that God was in all their thoughts.
Everything spoke to them of Him. He was the first and only ex-
planation to their spiritual being of all that they beheld, and not, as
theism teaches, the last generalisation of sense-given experience. The
name by which they knew Him shows this. Jahve, the I am, was
sufficient for them in His personality and the fact of His existence.
This was something very much different from Dyaus-Vulcanus,
or any other phenomenal expression ; it was really, what we call in
our more general language, an intuition of the Divine by the spirit-
ual faculty. He had other names, it is true, partly borrowed from
neighbouring nations, and partly expressive of the attributes of His
Being. He never was mere existence, but stood related to them and
all things in a living way, and from these relations they faintly tried
in speech to express the manifestations of His Being, but at the
same time always distinguishing Him from His appellations.

It is difficult to formulate any statement sufficiently embracing to
express the position of the Jewish people and their work in this
spiritual manifestation ; but as other nations are considered to have
laid for us the foundation of science, art, and polity, we may surely
conceive this nation as having laid the foundation of all true spirit-
ual insight, and begun a course of religious development of thought,
and life, which is of not inferior interest to the parallel development
of science. But, while we say that the Jews laid the foundation, we
are not to be held as saying that religious life had elsewhere, or
would now with us have had, no existence but for them, any more than
by the common remark that the Greeks taught us science are we
considered as holding that knowledge had, or would have had, no
existence but for its cultivation in Greece. The position we claim
for the Jews has, we shall see, nothing in it contradictory to the

106 REASON AND REVELATION.

statement of the apostle, that God " hath made of one blood all
nations of men for to dwell on the face of the earth, and hath deter-
mined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation ;
that they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after Him,
and find Him, though He be not far from every one of us." Any
reading of revelation that contradicts this, which is the very heart
of what Christ came to teach, must be erroneous. But we may be
far enough away from God, although He is ever near us ; and seek-
ing and feeling after are conditions of a spiritual life and a spiritual
consciousness that have not risen above a mere primitive and in-
definite state. As in the natural world, however, we do not seek to
pass moral judgment upon the undeveloped germ, but, on the con-
trary, admire the marvellous process by which it may yet unfold
its hidden powero, so in the spiritual sphere we may recognise a
more or less matured and f ally formed, as well as an immature and
almost indistinguishable stage of existence, without implying either
praise or blame. That belongs not to the investigator of truth,
but to the moral censor, offices which are very widely apart.

In the Jewish history we see, — to use old, and I hope not quite
extinct phraseology, — a separation and a call of individuals, consum-
mated in a separation and a call of a nation, through which the
Divine is brought near to man as man. It began in seeming ex-
clusiveness and with apparent arbitrariness ; but what is there that
does not to all mere outward observation begin in the same way P
Its real destination was not local but universal ; all nations were to
be blessed in Abraham. Abraham's history, like that of Enoch
and Noah before him, and of Isaac, Jacob, Moses and others after
him, although revealed to him in its distinctiveness as a natural
history with the Divine running through it, was really the same as
other men's histories where the Divine was not recognised.* The
difference between the two classes of histories lies in the spiritual
perception of this revelation, not in the fact of the Divine in the
human, as we shall see immediately. The mass of the Jewish,
people, although a holy priesthood as they are called, were often
grossly blinded to the higher life ; but, as within the larger circle
among the nations of the earth there was this smaller circle of a
particular nation, so within this latter there was a still smaller circle

* The remarks about these early personages in the Jewish narrative are per-
tinent, whether we regard them as historical personages or merely, as some
think, traditional. There can be no question that tradition has a veritable his-
torical background.

THE MANIFESTATION OF SPIRITUAL TRUTH. 107

of priests, who represented the higher consciousness and the life of
nearer communion with God ; and within this again another circle
with a yet higher development, — the prophets, to whom were re-
vealed the spiritual manifestations which the others, through weak-
ness of their spiritual nature, could often not receive ; and of these
last the perfect one was reached in Him whom the Lord their God
was to raise up, and in whom was realised the highest and fullest
development of that Divine consciousness, which was symbolised
and imperfectly shadowed forth in the whole Jewish life and
history, and particularly in the prophets. The educational process
through which the Jewish people passed is no magical thing,
although it must ever remain for us a spiritual phenomenon, and as
such, cannot be considered in the light of a mere national develop-
ment (in the usual sense of that term), traceable by the ordinary laws
of national evolution. It is separated from a kind of magical revela-
tion, current in many other countries, by the clear unfolding of a
germ of the Divine through spiritually perceptible forms, until the
perfect unfolding came in the person of Christ, whose ideal the
national Jewish life, in its representative men, had ever been striv-
ing to reach, and which was ultimately bodied forth to humanity.
In Christ, therefore, we can recognise the perfect form of revelation
as essentially the union of the Divine with the human, in other words,
of the supernatural or spiritual with the natural. The spiritual
had to blend with the natural. With more or less imperfection
the union had been taking place ; partial or " germinating " ful-
filments of this Divine idea had been witnessed in Jewish men
and institutions, but none except Christ, who is in the very bosom
of the Father, could be in the best sense the way, the truth, and
the light. He only could perfectly manifest God's name to men,
and unite them to their heavenly Father : " I in them, and Thou
in Me, that they may be made perfect in one."

We have, of course, in the account of Jewish life, as well as later
on in the -memoirs of the life of Christ, records of undoubted his-
tory, with elements susceptible of reduction to historical and social-
istic laws. That is to be expected; but we have also, what we
formerly noticed in our remarks on the question of miracles, ele-
ments, which, while not antagonistic to scientific and natural facts,
constitute a revelation of facts that could not otherwise have been
made known. For what is really the main purport of Jewish
history ? Is its chief lesson not just this, that sequence and sen-
sible relations are not the only things in the affairs of men and in

108 REASON AND REVELATION.

the changes of nature, but that the Divine is behind all sequences
and mere sensible relations P It supplies that which ordinary ex-
perience omits. Men of science are apt to be misled by the idoj
of hasty generalisation, and to think everything explained when
the cause in a series of phenomena is found out — when, by a given
number of observations and a few eliminations and variations, an-
tecedent and consequent are invariably found to recur. But they
forget, what our great ignorance should prevent us all from over-
looking, that there may be an element or elements not subject
to their test of variations, which sensible observation is not at
liberty to eliminate, for the very simple reason that it cannot deal
with them. In every sequence, however regular, and indeed in
many cases because of the regularity, a Divine consciousness sees an
element which the sensible perception cannot see. To one who
does not recognise this faculty in man, what antecedent to any con-
sequent can explain order in nature, for instance, progress in
history, and development everywhere ? None that pure science
recognises. It recognises the consequent, and, has indeed, brought
these truths under our notice, but it cannot explain them ; they are
ultimate principles, and very much without meaning to it. But to
him who knows from spiritual culture that the Divine is every-
where, the meaning of these terms is clear, and their relations
evident.

The two orders of truth, the one given in spiritual consciousness,
and the other in sensible perception, must be taken together. The one
without the other is imperfect, and can never give us a comprehensive
view of the system of things. For this reason the Christian percep-
tion of the Divine, although not originally dependent on natural
knowledge, is much fuller than the Jewish ; not merely through in-
creased revelation of the spiritual in Christ, but by all the increase
of our knowledge of natural phenomena. The idea of general laws
and orderly occurrences in events, with which we are now familiar, is
well fitted to inspire the Christian mind with the notion of God as no
arbitrary being. The Jewish conceptions help to direct us to spirit and
personality, which are rendered obscure through the observation of
law in the sequences of phenomena. The revelation of the Divine
may thus be regarded, on one side at least, as corrective of the in-
fluence of scientific observation pure and simple, and the latter may
bo looked at in the light of a needful balance to the idea of an
irregular and arbitrary interference. It is the tendency of the
scientific idea to encourage individual and social exertion, and of

THE MANIFESTATION OF SPIRITUAL TRUTH. 109

the spiritual to give man confidence in the results of his labour as
-well as support in its prosecution — a view which Paul expresses in
the spiritual sphere, when he says, " Work out your own salvation
with fear and trembling: for it is God which worketh in you both to
will and to do of His good pleasure." In the life of the Jews we are
not only told of this working of God everywhere, but it is displayed
before our eyes ; it is evident in their narratives and poetical
writings, but most of all in the prophecies. The prophecies are, in
fact, " illuminations of God's Spirit upon the events of history " in
the Jewish nation in particular, and, by extension, in the history of
every other nation. A principle of any kind once made known can
be easily applied in similar cases. The perception of the principle
is the main thing, the .place and time where it is perceived is
immaterial. The principle of geological action discovered in this
country at any given time may be extended in like circumstances
to another country and another time.

The Old Testament Scriptures are certainly in many ways a unique
chapter in the history of the world ; but we are apt to exaggerate
this singularity, and to rise from their perusal with the conviction,
that, however God might interfere in guiding the counsels of this
nation — now chastising it and anon pardoning it, now sending it
intimations of His will and again punishing it for neglect of this
revelation, He dealt not so with any other people ; meaning by this
that others were utterly ignored by God. But this is entirely to
misconstrue the purpose of the Old Testament revelations. They
are not merely a record of the great things God did for the people
of Israel, but they lay — and this is their chief use to use— before the
universal spiritual vision the great principles of His action with all
people on the face of the earth, viz., that He has not cut off any of them
from His supreme control, that He giveth to all life, and breath,
and all things, that His kingdom ruleth over all. If the Jews alone
can be truly said to have discovered the idea of a spiritual Being
ruling in the earth, and especially among themselves, this rule was
no less in exercise among those whom we call heathen, although they
might not discern it.

The manifestation in Hebrew Scripture purports to be a manifes-
tation of the spiritual. This is its starting point, and through
individual life and national history and ethnological survey it keeps
this course. What we express by prophecy as well as by miracle is
that the spiritual has come home to man. Nothing shows this so well
as the very noticeable fact, that revelation begins and ends in pro-

110 SEASON AND REVELATION.

phecy, simply because any spiritual manifestation, at all events the
earlier stages of it, will partake of the prophetic while moving in the
natural and current history of the particular time. Though coloured
by passing events, it will stretch out into the illimitable ; although
appearing in time, it will have about it an element of timelessness ;
although in the world, it will possess that which characterised the
great Bevealer and perfect prophet : it will not be of the world. The
spiritual in man only faintly and indistinctly descries this new
sphere at the first. His spiritual faculties are excited by the con-
sciousness of somewhat outside of him corresponding to these powers.
For it is true of the spiritual in man as well as of the natural, that
"he cannot live without a world." "His faculties," as has been
well said, "refer to natures out of him, and predict the world he is
to inhabit, as the fins of the fish foreshadow that water exists." The
strange phenomena which we rank under the external appearances
of prophecy are the first stragglings of this inner spiritual power.
The prophet or spiritual speaker shows in this world what Talbot
would have shown, had he been "here," —

" His substance is not here,
For what yon see is but the smallest part,
And least proportion of humanity ;
Bnt were the whole frame here,
It is of such a spacious, lofty pitch,
Your roof were not sufficient to contain it"

It is because this " roof " cannot contain the spirit, that it struggles
to be free of its confinement. Like an imprisoned thing, and dimly
alive to freedom, it beats the bars that hold it down. Thus, pertur-
bation and convulsions are not unfrequent accompaniments of early
spiritual manifestation among the Jews, a fact which has been again
and again noticed in regard to pagan prophets. Indeed the simi-
larity is too striking to be altogether overlooked. Indian tribes as
well as some Jewish prophets knew how to produce the prophetic
state by fasting and meditation. Schoolcraft in his account of Indian
tribes, relates of a North American prophetess who fell into an ec-
stasy at her solitary fast at womanhood, and at the call of the spirit
went up into heaven by the path that leads to the opening of the sky.
There she heard a voice, and pausing saw the figure of a man stand-
ing near the path whose head was covered by a brilliant halo, and
his breast with squares, and he said, " Look at me ; my name is the
bright blue sky." The Jews, in like manner, had some belief that
they could prepare their minds for the reception of a higher illumi-

THE MANIFESTATION OF SPIRITUAL TRUTH. Ill

nation by a bodily training. The inner conditions being presupposed,
the external bodily conditions appeared to some to have great in-
fluence npon the reception of a vision. In the book of Daniel it is
recorded that he mourned for three weeks and ate no pleasant bread,
neither came flesh nor wine in his month.

Another means common to Jew and pagan for inducing the pro-
phetic state was music. The Patagonian wizard begins his perform-
ance with drumming and rattling until the epileptic fit comes on
by the demon entering him, who then answers questions from within
him with a faint and mournful voice. The devil-dancers among the
wild Veddas of Ceylon have to work themselves into a paroxysm
in order to gain the inspiration whereby they profess to cure their
patients. With furious dancing to the music and chanting of the at-
tendants the Bodo priest brings on the fit of maniacal inspiration,
in which the deity fills him and gives oracles through him. In
2 Kings iii. 15, we read that Elisha before prophesying, asked a
minstrel to be brought to him to play, and immediately the hand of
the Lord came upon him. In 1 Samuel x. 5 Samuel tells- Saul,
" Thou shalt meet a company of prophets coming down from the
high place with a psaltery, and a tabret, and a pipe, and a harp be-
fore them ; and they shall prophesy." Natural sounds seemed to
have the same effect as artificial. As certain pagan oracles had their
seat in a wood where pleasing sounds might fill the ear, so we find
that some of the visions, of which we read in the Old Testament,
were seen as the prophets lay by the bank of some murmuring
stream, as Daniel, e.g., at the river Hiddekel. If we look at the
bodily condition produced in the prophets among low forms of civili-
sation, we shall see how much it resembles some of those physical
states recorded in the Old Testament prophecies as occasioned by a
vision. In Kamtchatka the female shamans, when Bellukai came
down into them in a thunderstorm, would prophesy, or receiving
spirits with a cry of hush, with chattering teeth as in a fever, they
said they were ready to divine. Daniel says : " When I heard the
voice of His words, then was I in a deep sleep on my face, and my
face toward the ground. And, behold, a hand touched me, which
set me upon my knees, and upon the palms of my hands." And
again, " when he had spoken the word unto me, I stood trembling."
It does not matter for our present purpose whether the book of
Daniel is, as some think, the literary product of an artistic age or
not, for even if it were, in order to be effective as a dramatic piece,
it must be true to the conditions of prophetic life among the Jews.

112 REASON AND REVELATION.

The appearance of madness, or what, to onlookers, seems like in-
toxication, which was a feature in ruder forms than the Delphian
oracle, was not unknown among the Hebrew prophets. Hosea (ix. 7)
says, " The days of visitation are come, the days of recompenoe are
come ; Israel shall know it : the prophet is a fool, the spiritual
man is mad, for the multitude of thine iniquity, and the great
hatred."* In the Fiji islands the priest, after remaining for some
time m silence, begins to tremble, after which convulsions follow,
accompanied by swelling of the veins. The god has entered him,
and with livid lips, eyes rolling, and the aspect of a madman, he
gives the divine answer. In Tahiti there are men so far like Jeremiah
and Paul that, in their natural state they show little power of elo-
quent utterance, but in convulsive delirium burst into earnest, lofty
speech " declaring the will and answer of the gods, and prophesy
in well knit harangues, full of the poetic figures and metaphors of
the professional orator." The Zulu converts see dreadful sights
in moments of religious excitement, such as snakes with great
eyes, wild scenes of men and animals, which may remind some ' of
Ezekiel's visions of the wheels with eyes, or John's vision of the
creatures before the eternal throne. Perhaps every external form in
which prophecy is spoken of in the Old Testament may be matched
by a corresponding form in the religious experience of other nations.
We should expect this. The difference between the manifestations
is not likely to lie there, but rather in the manifestation itself, of
which these things were but the accessories, and accessories which
the whole history of the Jews (and their prophetical history most of
all) shows to have been constantly subject to abuse. It is not the
mere ecstatic state that can guide us to the truth or error of the
spiritual manifestation, but that manifestation itself. Judging from
the development of revealed truth in the Bible, and the principles
stated throughout that book, it may be fairly inferred that these
physical accompaniments were mainly owing to the want of prepara-
tion in the human spirit for the reception of Divine thoughts. The
fundamental condition of this reception is really that the recipient
should be in deep internal spiritual accord with the Divine mind.
From the special truths which particular men perceived, and from the
general temperament of the men, the period of history and of spirit-
ual development in which they lived, bodily perturbation more or

* See also Jer. xxix. 26 ; Isa. xxiz. 9 ; 2 Kings ix. 11, and at the transition
period of religious life among the Jews, Acts ii. 13.

THE MANIFESTATION OF SPIRITUAL TRUTH. 113

lees varied arose, and had to be allayed, in order that a fuller vision
of the Divine might enter the prophetic mind, undisturbed by the
violent action of the organs of sense. But the more we are convinced
of the external similarity between Jewish prophecy, and ecstatic
states elsewhere, the more necessity we feel to direct our attention to
the decided contrast to be found in the deeper spiritual elements
which formed the characteristic of both. The manifestation con-
sidered as an unveiling of spiritual truth to an inquiring mind was
not externa], or in any way physical. In the case of Paul, e.g., tho
sensible phenomena were all apparent to the men who journeyed
with him, but the spiritual revelation spoken to the Divine within
Paul's soul was only perceived by himself ; and in the case of Daniel,
those who were beside him at the river Hiddekel were afraid, but
saw not the vision. In like manner, states of body or mind may be
produced bearing the closest resemblance to prophetic accompani-
ments ; but the heart of prophecy was the unfolding of a spiritual
truth, in some form, to the spiritual perception of the prophet;
whether this was in dream or in open vision, in suspension of the
senses or in ecstatic elevation, was quite non-essential. The accom-
paniments might be seen by any one, but the Divine that was in
them could only be perceived by those to whom they were sent,
that is, to those with the spiritual faculty trained for the reception
of the order of truths addressed to it. Pharaoh, e.g., knew his
dreams externally, and others are similarly represented to have
known theirs ; but that which was really a spiritual manifestation in
the dreams was veiled from them. This is where we see these Old
Testament revelations contrast so strongly with Gentile oracles. The
former mirror spiritual truths more exactly, the latter, as seen in the
American prophetess of whom I spoke, seem more like pictures of
what might dimly be spiritual, overshadowed by kosmical experience.
The one was a beholding of actual spiritual fact, the other was a
certain vividness of imagination excited, no doubt, by awakening
spiritual impulses. The basis of the one was God, eternity, and
spiritual facts; the world and time lay at the foundation of the
other. As has been said, " it is want of originality that marks the
visionaries of older and more modern times;" and this is precisely
what the Old Testament seers and prophets possess.

Although, therefore, the mere physical accompaniments are not
revelations, it is impossible to overlook them entirely in a view of
spiritual manifestation, giving, as they seem to do, indications of a
spiritual faculty among all nations, but in very various degrees of

114 EEASON AND REVELATION.

perfection. It is much easier, however, to say what were the sensible
elements, than it is to say what was the Divine element, in all these
manifestations and acts of consciousness of the spiritual. The psy-
chological and physiological symptoms of which we are informed do
not supply us with mots sufficient to construct a definite theory.
The written accounts of early communications between the Divine
and the human spirit have received the stamp of a peculiar phrase-
ology, which must be held, as in some respects, technically descrip-
tive of the act of manifestation and spiritual condition of the man
who was the subject of it. The general expression made use of in
the history of the patriarchs, " the Lord said unto Noah," etc., as
well as that employed by the later prophets, " the hand of the Lord
was upon me," or intensely, " was strong upon me," are recognised
formulsB introductory to spiritual announcements. The description
of the mode of perception as visual carries with it a similar technical
meaning. We have this in Balaam, Samuel, Isaiah, and down to
the apocalyptic writer of the New Testament: "He hath said
which saw the vision," " The word that Isaiah saw," " the vision
which I saw," are the ordinary preludes to a Divine communication.
The detailed accounts which the prophets themselves give of these
visions confirm their description of them.*

It is probable that what is known as the perspective of prophecy,
which has sometimes proved so puzzling to interpreters, originates
in " the vision." By the perspective in prophecy is generally under-
stood that peculiar feature of it by which the near and remote seem
strangely commingled in the prophet's mind. The events and
thoughts stand out before the spiritual sight as yet only partially
trained to such scenes and thoughts, but they appear to lie so close
upon each other, that those far distant seem almost as prominent as
those which, in point of time, are near at hand. Or for the nonce it
would seem that events take the form which they have in the Divine
Mind, with whom one day is as a thousand years; so that to the
prophet's spiritual eye successive occurrences are represented as if
they were synchronous. This is the timelessness of prophecy which,
in one view of it, is just the expression of the fact that it had
mainly to do with principles in which time is no necessary element,
they being universally true. That it took a scenic form is mainly
owing to the early stage of spiritual development. Thoughts, in

* In the opinion of some these visions are reflected poetical extensions by the
prophet, of his spiritual perceptions.

THE MANIFESTATION OP SPIRITUAL TRUTH. 115

every department of mental activity are more vivid and striking to
the uncultured man than they are to the man in a more advanced
state. In the seer or contemplator who beheld spiritual truths in
dream or vision we may observe how the primitive spiritual con-
sciousness was stirred and sometimes, as it were,' startled by the
movements of the Divine Spirit.

We can scarcely realise to ourselves the dawning of this new form
of life and perception among men in whom God's Spirit was work-
ing — the wrestlings, and alternate recognitions, and rebellions of the
soul in its half conscious awakenings. Nor can we imagine the thrill
and intoxicating delight with which a spiritual manifestation was re-
ceived by a soul that had been patiently awaiting the Divine revela-
tion. What words could adequately describe the delirium and sense
of self-abandonment in the man who, through long listening to the
Divine admonitions that spoke to him, perceived in faintest outline
the sum of spiritual truth, and said "God" ? The perception must
have been to him like a vision ; he must have felt as in a dream or
trance, and as if God spoke to him within his own soul. It was a
revelation of the unseen, an apocalypse of what was hidden behind
the veil of sense, a veritable manifestation of the spiritual. And
this, which was the essence of early revelation, is likewise that of
later revelation. The distinctive character of the men to whom these
spiritual manifestations came was that of men of faith. The root of
their spiritual life was in the invisible, and they drew from it their
highest inspiration and deepest insight. It has been said by Kant
(in his "Religion within the Limits of Reason") in regard to various
mysteries, that " God has revealed nothing, and cannot grant us
such a revelation, for we could not understand it. It is not con-
ceivable that God could convey to us a mysterious knowledge by
inspiration, for our understanding is, by its nature, unfitted for such
a deposit." We accept this position of Kant's in regard to those
mysteries which the theological understanding, working on revealed
truth, has contrived to deduce by a perversion both of its faculties
and the truth on which they operated ; but we do not see how his
remark applies to revelation as a spiritual manifestation. A mys-
terious knowledge by inspiration is by no means a correct equivalent
for spiritual manifestation. The external world is a manifestation,
and to men with the profoundest acquaintance with its laws it is
still at heart a mystery. Human life is a manifestation, but it is no
less a puzzle to us. In like manner, it does not follow that a spiritual
manifestation being given, it should forthwith be understood. We

I 2

116 REASON AND REVELATION.

are told that the minds of the prophets were led to search " what,
or what manner of time the Spirit of Christ which was in them did
signify, when it testified beforehand the sufferings of Christ and the
glory that should follow." We do not think by any means that we
are to conclude, that a particular prophecy was to the prophet him-
self wholly unintelligible, or, as Kant expresses it, that his message
was to him a mysterious knowledge conveyed by inspiration. The
prophets invariably, as is evident, attached some meaning to the
visions which they describe. The fact being that they must have
attached some meaning to the form of words they used. Any doubt
about the intelligibility of the thought, can only be with reference to
the extent of their insight into the revelations. And here it is
evident that the men were limited by the conceptions, as they were
by the language, of their own time. Their revelations are, in fact,
so modified, and their comprehension of them must have been
similarly conditioned.

These forms were the human and local moulds, into which the
divine facts and principles given in the spiritual manifestation, and
true for all time, although thus embodied, were cast. Revelation,
while having its source in God's Spirit, must assume some definite
shape in passing through the human spirit, which is a factor in all
spiritual manifestation. There must necessarily be the historical
element in all spiritual manifestation, — an element which has oc-
casioned perhaps more blunders and led to more disputes than the
revelation proper. The mould into which the Jewish spirit threw
its revelation was naturally that of its own nationality. The higher
spiritual intelligences of the nation might see more clearly than
others into the spiritual manifestations, but they saw them through
these national colourings. Nothing shows this so vividly as the
mode in which they spoke of their great central revelation — the
Messianic hope. The Person who was the object of all the prophets'
visions, was represented as the head of the Jewish theocracy.
There is no denying that the medium was imperfect. All our media
are so ; but there is nevertheless a deep reality and no illusoriness
in such a mode of perception. We cannot see how the prophets
could have talked and thought intelligibly under another form ; it
only becomes ridiculous, if not inane, when we in the present day
affect the same form. A Greek speaks like a Greek, and a Roman
like a Roman, and why not a Hebrew like a Hebrew ? It would
have been no spiritual manifestation to the children of Israel had
Abraham, Moses, Joel, Isaiah spoken (supposing such a thing pos-

THE MANIFESTATION OF SPIRITUAL TRUTH. 117

sible) in the language and mode of the 19th century. The form of
a truth has only an extrinsic interest for those who have outlived the
fashion of the time in which the two emerged together, but it is of
vital consequence to those who are contemporary with their first ap-
pearance. And if it is true that revelation presupposes a human
modification, it is as true, that the man who received it, must con-
ceive and express it in relation to his own age — that in images, as
well as language, the eternal truth which he perceives will be un-
avoidably historical. It is through failing to observe this that the
controversy about the Messianic psalms, for example, continues;
and it is neglect of the very same fact that has given occasion to
another discussion quite as fertile in its general outcome, namely,
that of the restoration of the Hebrew nation. The writers of the
psalms and the speakers of visions contemplating the affairs of their
nation, with spirits full of the perception of the Divine in their history,
and with a firm reliance on a spiritual order, speak frequently of
some perfect form of kinghood, or ideal ruler; but history might
have to show what or who this actually was to be. It is most likely
that these prophets and psalm writers looked for the realisation of
this perfect King in some not very distant actual king of heightened
spiritual culture, and hence these accessories in the picture, of his
coming in material splendour, and even with the dread accompani-
ments of war, belonging to the periods with which the utterances
are connected. Many of these matters can, however, be only of
secondary importance to us. They do not give us with equal clear-
ness what was special in the spiritual manifestation of the Jews,
but often what were the thoughts of the Jewish mind about this
manifestation. This is a distinction that is of the last importance
to us in seeking to gain an intelligent apprehension of early revela-
tions.

As a fact, however, it ought to be noticed that partial fulfilments
of these visions were pressing on the times in which the visions were
made known. The visions themselves helped to sustain the hopes
of the spiritually faint. Some successor to the seer finds that
history declares the time unripe for its perfect realisation, and he
takes up the strain and, stirred by new events in the national life,
and inspired with a deep insight into the spiritual facts behind these
events, clothes them in the same fundamental forms, but with wider
reaches and more extended outlook. This recurrence of strains on
the great thought of the Old Testament revelation — that of a ruling
God, is more frequent, as the time seems barren of accomplishment.

118 SEASON AND REVELATION .

At the first the men of spiritual perception were sharp, curt, and
sudden in action, and their representations are, although vigorous,
to us rude, and suggest a close fight with times that were little alive
to spiritual facts. But by-and-by the conception of God becomes
broadened, personal experience and national teaching and the Holy
Spirit striving in men's souls, enlarge the spiritual prospect of the
men who lived in the middle period of Jewish prophecy, and from
this period we can gather more fully the principles in these prophecies
and teachings, and can see in them that which was really Divine,
and at the same time what was really Divine in the Jewish literature
and life. It was, to state it shortly, the perception in history, by
means of a developed spiritual capacity, of spiritual truth — of a
Divine order of things on which the human reposes. The "day of
the Lord," for example, spoken of from the earliest times in which
larger events began to be viewed with reference to the growing con-
ception of the spiritual sphere, was felt always to be near at hand.
It was no mere figure of prophecy, but a spiritual fact. It threat-
ened the nation in Joel's time with- real and not imaginary evil, sur-
rounding them with undoubted historical colouring. In Isaiah and
Jeremiah it is still the same, and in the time of Christ it is as vividly
historical. But in all of them there is an element that is unhis-
torical, which, while true in its historical setting, points at the same
time to a period beyond. That which is a spiritual manifestation in
this and other Old Testament utterances that look predictive is the
latter element, that which is sensible is the historic. That which
is revelation in the present case, as in every event, is that the day is
the* Lord's. This day is not one but many ; and the Jewish mind
was taught to perceive, by a spiritual cognition, these occurrences
that happened to their own nation not as mere historic sequences,
but as Divine events, having in them that significance and spiritual
importance which may yet become more fully visible to the spiritual
eye in the grand fulfilment. To take this one instance, we see the
forms gradually drop away from the idea of the " great and terrible
day " of the Hebrew seers, until the spiritual truth stands out in
Christ relieved of all such, and the times and seasons are felt to be
in the Father's hands. And so is it with other great spiritual verities
in the Old Testament : the course of their development is marked
by a relief from all that was national, temporal, and limiting. At
first the spiritual manifestations among the Jews were held in some-
thing like physical bonds ; their conceptions of much that related to
the religious life were tightly bound about with the cerements of the

THR MANIFESTATION OF SPIRITUAL TRUTH. 119

earthly; and these were never wholly unloosed until the great
spiritual Revealer came, and made that which was universal in the
higher manifestation in Israel stand forth resplendent. We can
see this universality even in the special Judaistic form, gathering
strength and persistency and beauty in its chrysalis folds. The
spiritual had been manifesting itself to men gifted with powers more
or less capable of perceiving it. As one has said, the prophets of
ancient Israel were " like the chorus in the world's drama." The
entire nation, with its institutions, its national relations to other
peoples, is, in the light of Jewish history, one great spiritual reve-
lation. It was a concrete manifestation of the kingdom of God upon
the earth, but panting constantly after a more ideal and spiritual
manifestation. The events within it were more than mere national
occurrences, they were spiritual phenomena as well. It appears to
have been the school for educating the spiritual in man, and pre-
paring it, by partial and fragmentary revelations, for the perfect
manifestation in Christ. The true Israel within the kingdom had
the veil drawn aside from the course of human affairs. Their actions,
whether as successes or failures, were perceived to be not alone the
results of national antecedents; they were regarded above every-
thing as manifestations of a kingdom of spiritual power and in-
fluence.

CHAPTER IX.

THE SPIRITUAL IN JUDAISM AND ELSEWHERE.

" He left not Himself without witness."

No subject of inquiry, perhaps, in the present day engages more
attention than the question concerning the relation between the
different religions of the world. Some of the previous chapters may,
by a few, be considered to have closed this investigation so far as
we are concerned. Mythology, however, is no more religion than
theology is religion. We have really learned very little about the
religious life, and spiritual impulses of a people, when we have gained
an introduction to their pantheon. The vitality of the Divine force
in them is scarcely to be caught thus crystallised. What estimation
could any one, in some thousands of years hence, form of the
strength of spiritual life in our day from any standard theological
treatise that should unfortunately survive so long P It must strike
every one who thinks on the matter at all, that as a theology con-
veys feeble, if any pulsations of the spiritual life throbbing in the
heart of a nation, so a mythology cannot make very audible to us
the beatings of the religious life of other days. For these we must
look to the general literature of the people, if there be any ; because
wherever this is genuine, and not merely artistic, it is the utterance
of national life, and moves responsive to it. We must know their
institutions and their varied social relations. It is in these that we
shall see the spiritual life of a people reflected. What consciousness
they had of any thing higher than time and sense will preserve itself,
according to its strength, in some vital way, for nowhere do men
willingly let the good die. And behind all literature and all na-
tionality there lies the recognition, vague enough sometimes, of the
Divine. Tradition has preserved it where the after-consciousness
of the people had become blind to its perception. When commu-
nities had forgotten the truths of this higher life, and had lost even
the faculty of seeing them, occasional gifted men in doubt and hesi-
tancy suggested them. Most nations have had their Divine law-
givers as well as the Jews .their Moses ; most have had fitful inti-
mations of a spiritual order in life, of which names of founders, and
systems of belief dimly understood, alone remain to us. No one

THE SPIRITUAL IN JUDAISM AND ELSEWHERE. 121

can doubt that there were spiritual impulses in a Buddha and a
Zoroaster, that feelings of deep susceptibility to sin Were shown by
the offerer of sacrifices at the Egyptian shrine, as he killed his
animal and smote upon his breast, praying that his sins and calami-
ties might fall upon his victim. God is a God that loveth justice,
and we can scarcely credit the existence of a state in the spiritual
world that we should look upon with horror in the natural. We
believe there is such a thing as selection in life — in spiritual life as
well as in vegetable and animal ; but the theory of natural selection
is very different from the theological one of election, and we believe
expresses a great truth more correctly. The idea of election, as
sometimes explained, is revolting to our common sense of fairness
when introduced to account for the extraordinary development of
spiritual life among the Jews. That God called this people to a
specific work is a great fact ; but He called them, because they
showed themselves fitted for His great purposes. In fact, a call in
the spiritual sense is only the Divine side of fitness for any work.
The Jews were His chosen people in the sense that all life now
existing is His choice, that is, in the sense that they best conformed
to the principles of the life which they were destined to represent.
This can be the only acceptable sense in which a rational man can
entertain the doctrine of election even in the individual " The
glory and honour of the nations " which God shall bring into the
new Jerusalem, will simply be those types of humanity who have
stood the test of spiritual selection — those whose lives are " hid with
Christ in God," and who have striven to be perfect like their Father
in heaven.

Men started in natural life with faculties or potentialities of
faculties alike, and an environment in which they might be exer-
cised; and the probability is, that the same thing took place in
spiritual life. God was not far from the Aryans no more than He
was far from the Semites, but He was not always felt by both to be
equally near. Without any latitude of expression, we may say that
revelation dawned upon the pagan mind as it did upon the Jewish,
but it appeared to the former in glimmerings so faint and amid so
much surrounding darkness as to render the embrace of the light
in any fulness impossible. The light shone in the darkness as it has
never ceased to shine, but the darkness did not always persistently
embrace it. The one factor of revelation was there, and has never
been absent from our world, but the other factor — the human con-
sciousness, was not always prepared for that heavenly light. In

122 SEASON AND REVELATION.

most cases men sank into utter unconsciousness, and played in
fantasy with their former perceptions. It is in this way that we see
how many religions, in the stages in which we have any historic
account of them, exhibit the subversion of spirit to sense. There
was a vein of morality in them, otherwise they never would have
existed; but there, was just as much as kept them from internal
decay, yet not enough to keep them from the destruction which came
upon them, when encountered by a healthier moral and spiritual
life. The conception of nature as well as of human life, in ethnic
religions as a whole, was characterised by the subordination of the
spiritual to the sensible, and thus followed, what has been so often
observed in these religions as contrasted with the Jewish, a low
state of moral consciousness. Paul describes this in his strong way
when he says they " did not like to retain G-od in their knowledge."
They had moral truth, on which a spiritual revelation could be
founded, but what of moral was in these religions, was not the re-
sult of such a revelation, but the reflection merely of that spirit of
man that was in him. We are confronted sometimes with the fine
moral maxims of pagan thinkers, and we shall consider afterwards
what comparison can be most properly made between them and the
vital truths of revelation. Suffice it to say here, that these ethical
truths were, in the main, such approximations only to the spiritual
as the relations of man to his fellow men could give, and did not
flow from a feeling of the relation of all to God. Morality is, pro-
perly speaking, the expression of the former relationship, as has
been already pointed out, and may be conceived independent of a
higher spiritual insight. There is here no allusion to morality as
it is at present, and which we may afterwards find to be indebted
to both sources. And once for all I wish it to be clearly under-
stood that a statement of this kind is not to be interpreted as if I
thought with some that the pagan mind was cut off from the gra-
cious action of the Divine, and the greater portion of the human
race, accordingly, shut up amid the sensible and evanescent. Those
who hold such language forget that the gracious action of the Divine
is operative in moral and natural life — that what is distinctly re-
cognisable as Divine in them is so recognised by an inner spiritual
consciousness, and that, therefore, revelation, as an unfolding of
what is unseen and behind the ordinary processes of nature, need
not be confined to the Jews alone. Other nations may have had
spiritual communications as well, but the genius of paganism led
it away from the strictly spiritual, while it only tried spasmodically

THE SPIRITUAL IN JUDAISM AND ELSEWHERE. 123

to rend the veil and look behind the drapery of nature, prompted
no doubt bj the reality of the intimations of the unseen. That
these essays were so little effective was owing to the want of vitality
in the spiritual part of their being ; a want which may have tended
to the formation of systems of make-believe, whereby men deluded
themselves with pretended utterances from the gods. These per-
verted efforts only produced an imaginary sphere outside, answering
to the fancies of men's minds. A true revelation of the spiritual
ought, on the contrary, to produce the opposite result. It should
make an inner subjective experience, answering to the outer objective
manifestation, The fruit of paganism in this direction was the evo-
lution of a world of beings from its own consciousness ; but the
world of spirit, when unveiled to man, must effect a correspondence
in his life, and thought, with that manifested state.

The most apparent difference between the revelation of the Divine
among the Jews and a similar revelation among other nations is,
that with the former it was an orderly evolution of spiritual life
and experience, with the latter it was not. Various nations had
men of keen insight, gifted with marvellous intuitive powers, but no
other nation ever had, or pretended to have, a constitution whose
very essence was that of being a spiritual kingdom. What was
really unique in the Jewish life was the fact that it was felt to be
surrounded by the Divine — that, taking a Jew humanly, socially,
nationally, he was conscious of being encompassed by the spiritual.
The ideal of the nation was that of a nation of priests to God.
They might not all become such, but the general consciousness never
failed to have this ideal brought before it by the few who struggled
to attain it and who felt the Divine Word stirring within them.
A man like Moses, more powerfully moved than his fellows by the
hand of the Lord upon him, that is, profoundly alive to the reality
of the Divine relations in which he stood, communicated his life to
the slumbering men of the community. He and those who came
after him were not themselves independent of the men who pre-
ceded them. It is not always a new revelation which they have to
give, nor is it necessarily a new fact that they have the capacity of
spiritually perceiving. They have the gift of the Spirit, which " in
measure " was given to all the community, and had been developed
more or less in its successive members, while it reached in a few
only to a vigour that still astonishes every man of spiritual insight.
Moses re-delivers an old truth, which had become obscure, adding
thereto a truth first uttered by himself. He recalls, for example, the

124 REASON AND REVELATION.

chosen people to the recognition of tbte God whom their fathers
knew — the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; but he builds on this
a new conception of the Divine. Christ comes to fulfil the law and
the prophets as well as to proclaim new truths.

There are no eras in history to be compared with those when the
Spirit of God spoke to Abraham in Ur of the Chaldees, and invited
him to be the head of a holy nation — when Moses revived the life
of that people, summoned to the task by the same Spirit in the
mountain of Horeb — when Christ, whom God raised up, founded
a universal kingdom of righteousness on the earth. The spiritual
thoughts of the Jewish people often reached the very lowest stage
between these intermediate epochs, but they never seem to have been
quite extinct. The fire was kept smouldering somewhere, until the
Spirit of the Lord fanned the flame, and made the heart of some
pious soul burn. In their darkest days there were some who had
not bowed the knee to a strange god, however many might be Baying
in their hearts, "There is no God." It must have been during
these periods that we have the accounts of prophets and prophecies
which, in many of their features, resemble the artificial prophetic
spirit among Gentile nations. There were clearly seasons when the
spirituality of the people as a whole had become nearly dead, and
only the semblance of life remained to them. In this condition it
was only natural that they should attempt to keep up by skill, and
sometimes by bare cunning, the mere trick of that which was the
natural outcome of spiritual experience. The greater prophets
in Israel had often to raise their voices against this degenerate
sham- deliverance of Divine messages. " When they shall say unto
you, Seek unto them that have familiar spirits, and unto wizards
that peep, and that mutter : should not a people seek unto their
God? " * There can be little doubt that this artificial form of pro-
phecy had been prevalent to a considerable extent among the Jews
before Isaiah's day, and that it continued with decreasing power
after his time. The story of Saul inquiring of the witch at Endor
recorded in the book of Samuel f is the best example of the spirit
which Isaiah here describes. Nor is the weird story without its
comment. Saul had been moved by a very different spirit in other
days, and had received intimations from God ; he had even been
found among the prophets ; but the clear spiritual consciousness of
the man became dimmed, and he felt powerless before the bewildering

* Isa. viii. 19. 1 1 Sam. xxviii. 8, etc.

THE SPIRITUAL IN JUDAISM AND ELSEWHERE. 125

condition of his mind and the altered state of the country, and sought
by a forced and non-natural way, which he himself had formerly
tried to root out as a superstition, to learn what he could only learn
from the Divine in his own soul. The book of Chronicles * states
the two modes of spiritual perception — the false and the true, when
it says that Saul inquired of a familiar spirit and not of the Lord.
One of the great spiritual blessings of the Jewish people when they
reached the promised land after their wilderness journey was to be
the absence of enchanters, witches, charmers, consulters with fami-
liar spirits. Then, too, apparently as a consequence of this, they
were to be upright with the Lord.f Acts such as that of Saul spring
plainly from a darkening of the spiritual in men, or because, as
Isaiah says, no light is in them. This which was only temporary
in Israel had become constant elsewhere. The persistence of the
spiritual idea was characteristic of the Hebrew, its evanescence was
the feature in the Gentile. Hence the different spirit that moved
the different peoples, and hence also the approaches which they made
towards each other. There can be no doubt, on the face of the
history of the Jews, that they enjoyed many peculiar advantages.
It is always the case in every sphere, that to those who have more is
given. The spiritual element in the Jewish character, evoked in a
past which we can only in some instances faintly imagine, had been
from time to time asserting itself. Like other growths, it was sub-
ject to periods of decadence, but arose out of them with a fresher
and more vigorous vitality. It had its winters of barrenness, but
the springs and summers came. Although Divine, and under
Divine influences, it was far from arbitrary. No unconditional pro-
sperity attended this germ in Palestine ; no unconditional adversity
attended it elsewhere. "In every nation he that feareth" God
" and doeth righteousness is accepted with Him." It is only in
this way that we can explain those allusions bj Moses, Isaiah,
Jeremiah, Ezekiel, to the corruption of the spiritual in the Jewish
national life, the burden of which is, " The prophets prophesy lies
in My name : I sent them not, neither have I commanded them :
they prophesy unto you a false vision and divination, and a thing
of nought, and the deceit of their hearts." J " The word of the
Lord," "the oracle of Jehovah," "He saith," had been frequently
used by those to whom the Lord had never spoken. The blight
of unbelief fell on many a heart in this chosen people, but there is

• 1 Chron. x. 13. t Deut. xviii. 11-13. { J er. xiv. 14.

126 SEASON AND REVELATION.

through it all a note distinguishing their history from all other
history. We cannot help admiring it all the more, from the extreme
veracity that lies on the pages of this written history. There is
always the consciousness of their witness for the Divine, but there
is never absent from the minds of their greatest spirits and their
unknown chroniclers the feebleness of this testimony. Heathenism,
too, has its best explanation in the lapses of Judaism. The ten-
dency in common minds to debase the supernatural into the merely
superstitious was not absent from the Jews, as it is not an unusual
thing in our own days. Men will not endure the conditions of com-
munion with the Unseen made known to Abraham : " Walk before
Me, and be thou perfect." Purity of heart, which has been the
source of every genuine prophet's vision, is lost, the spiritual con-
sciousness becomes deadened, and mechanical means are invented
to restore the union. Bwald* has, we think, come very near the
truth when he says that visions and dreams were not the vehicles
of prophetic inspiration in the ideal of prophecy. It is at least a
very noticeable fact, that all the attempts resorted to in order to
induce the prophetical state are to be found during periods before
the more spiritually minded seers had declared their visions, or after
the impulse of their utterances had died out. They approached
more and more towards the perfect prophet to whom the Lord was
to speak without vision — face to face, and we see in them at the
same time a more decided opposition to anything like artificiality, f
The book of Daniel is the great exception to this, an exception
which is by no means without its support to grave reasons for
holding it a literary product of a later era. Calmness and dignity
in the messengers of Jehovah are becoming more manifest. The
ecstaoy and incoherence that are the result of fasting and music dis-
appear, and the element that stands out in these men is seen to be a
moral and spiritual perception of the most vivid description. The
voice of Ood in their soul is a powerful voice, but there is no force
in it overmastering consciousness. There is a decided mental ac-
tivity. Clearness and distinctness of consciousness are never lost,
nor are the mental processes obscured in the records of extreme
bodily prostration. Daniel even is represented as alive to all the
incidents that took place during his vision. The rapturous orac-

* " Die Lehre der Bibel yon Gott ; " crater Band.

t Outside Judaism we can see that Buddha, too, is a long way removed from
unnatural excitement.

THE SPIRITUAL IN JUDAISM AND ELSEWHERE. 127

ular utterance in paganism was certainly a very different thing. The
duplicity of it was notorious ; and both, we are persuaded, arose from
the artificial nature of the operation, and the consequent indefinite-
ness in conception of what was really spiritual. There was some
vague distinction between the spiritual and non-spiritual, but no
definitely realised spiritual sphere. What strikes us particularly in
Judaism is distinctness in its idea of spiritual truth. The prophet,
for instance, is not content with hasty guesses, but resorts to con-
templation and communion with Gocf before declaring His word.

Depth of moral and spiritual life is the striking feature of these
Hebrew prophets, and not so much ability to prognosticate the future.
If they had any insight at all, they must of course descry what was
to come. A man who knows well the past and present, as they did,
and observes the spiritual principles in both, will see at the same time
what is looming in the distance.* For the prophets' foresight is,
after all, the foresight of principles mainly, and in the fewest in-
stances that of events. They had more at heart the purification of
this holy people than the forecasting of the future, and it was their
vision of what should be, and their sense of what is not but what
might be, and what they, in the confidence of their hearts, felt there
would be, that made their vision so keen. Elsewhere, as with them in
dark times, the spiritual power became a mere system of enchantment.
Its designs had no sweep, but were confined to private ends ; it lost
sight of the Divine purposes in national and universal life ; and with
this absence of spiritual vision came absence of that simplicity which
is an unfailing mark of reality and universality, in spiritual as well
as other matters, and the prime characteristic of the legitimate Jewish
prophet.

But although the result was so different, it may be well to mark
distinctly the great cause of this divergence of spiritual character,
as found in Judaism and beyond it. Looking back, as we do, into
the past, from a point where the spiritual vision should be clear of

* In an essay on " The Definition and Method of Political Economy," Mr.
Mill, after describing the processes of analysis and synthesis as applied to social
questions, says, " If these various operations could be correctly performed the
result would be prophecy, but as they can be performed only with a certain
approximation to correctness, mankind can never predict with absolute certainty,
but only with a less or greater degree of probability." May not prophetic pre-
diction be the result of corresponding operations in the spiritual sphere, and
liable to a like uncertainty according to the clearer or darker spiritual insight of
the prophet and the truth or falsity of his accumulated religious experiences ?

128 ' REASON AND REVELATION.

all the mists and vapours engendered by contemporaneous life, we
may see more plainly what was common to Judaism and paganism,
and what was diverse in both. And this we must see was common
to them as it is to men everywhere now, that the same principles
run through the life of all. From one point of view, the records of
Judaism as a nation, are like the records of other nations, but there
is this decided difference between them, as is stated elsewhere in
another form, that the Hebrew was conscious of his dependence on a
Father in heaven, and retained a faith at all times in His rule and
governance, while the others did not. And this produced in the
Jews that entire distinctiveness of life and literature, which is only
occasional in other literatures. It developed in Jewish life a faith,
which among other peoples took the form of a regret or a longing.
It gave that which is so prominent in their writings — the hopes and
glorious expectation of a future, brighter than could be naturally
anticipated from many a present evil time. There is nothing more
striking (as has been noticed again and again) in any ancient litera-
ture than this exultant spirit of the Hebrews. While other nations
were looking to the past, as an imaginary rest for their wearied
spirits, from the disorders, and wrongs, and violences, that eddied
around them, the Jewish spirit descried deliverance in the future,
and calmly prognosticated a time when righteousness should rule,
and peace be triumphant in the earth. The golden age of the heathen
was behind him, and he was ever further and further receding from
its view ; the golden age of the Hebrew was before him, and he was
hastening on to its approach. The gods of the heathen were believed
to have held communion with men in the past, but the future showed
little sign of a renewal of that happy state ; the G-od of the Hebrews
was to reveal Himself and His truth in the future as He had not
done before. The night of evil and sin — the cloud of war and selfish-
ness, was often surrounding both : but to the one it was deepening
into a darker gloom and a more impenetrable shade ; to the other,
even in the night, the stars shone clear, and the sky was already
streaked with faint gleams that heralded a happy dawn.* The
Old Testament is jubilant of the future, both of man and nature ;
its writers had attained a conception, which, philosophically, is but
of comparatively modern date, namely, that of human perfectibility :
but it was to them more than a mental idea ; it was a confidence —

* This, with a people that had a garden of Eden among its traditions, is all the
more remarkable.

THE SPIRITUAL IN JUDAISM AND ELSEWHERE. 129

an unclouded faith, sustained by the thought which impregnated
their whole life, that God was directing their ways. Their past
career showed this, their uniform spiritual experience made them
feel, that the future history of man was a history devised in the
counsel of Jehovah; and feeling this, what other prospect could
they entertain than that of the final restoration of this earth from
the hands of evil, the final overthrow of iniquity, injustice, misrule,
and tyranny, and the establishment of holiness, justice, and equity ?
Science has inherited this Hebrew hopefulness, and extended its
application in many directions, and with a definiteness of which
the Hebrew did not dream. We are much mistaken if the anti-
cipatory character of modern times has not, in the main, a religious
basis — if all that is most characteristic of the scientific spirit, its
patience, calm, and foresight, have not their origin in the religious
temperament. It is at all events owing to this element in Jewish
life, that modern history to the spiritual eye is not silent on the
grand truth, that at her helm, guiding the seemingly reeling vessel
of human progress and human civilisation, is the Lord of all. The
sea of life may sometimes be rough ; often, as we have all seen, the
waves run high, nor ship nor helmsman is seen amid the raging surf,
and men are well nigh in despair, and tremble for the frail ark that
bears the framework of society and the humanities, won so hardly
from the past. But even then the man of profound spiritual con-
sciousness descries, through the shifting storm-cloud, the everlasting
stars, and hears, above the noise of the waves, " Peace, be still,*' and
beholds the ark, no longer frail, but like a stately craft, pursuing
its onward course. It is hopes like these, based on spiritual experi-
ence, which make the Jewish history more than the ordinary re-
cords of a nation. A history proper, we know, would have con-
tented itself with the investigation of the causes that advanced or
retarded the national wellbeing. But what have we in the Old
Testament P This, it is true, but very much subordinated to the
manifestations made to man's spiritual consciousness of the Divine
powers that were operating through these acts. The spiritual re-
velation to the spiritual in man, a pure science of history does not
and cannot touch ; its data must be relegated to our spiritual facul-
ties. The acts in the Jewish history are revelations as much as the
words spoken through prophets, for revelation consists, not in any
form of words, but in a manifestation of a sphere of being.

It has not been shown, and we fear cannot be explained, how the
spiritual life first formed itself in the Jewish character — how, for

K

130 REASON AND EEVELATION.

example, that idea of themselves as a people of God, a holy nation
with real spiritual and Divine relations, took root so firmly in the
consciousness of the community. When any new advance is gained
in the life and career of a people, it can usually be shown with some
approach to correctness what the element or elements were, which,
entering into its life and thought, gave impulse to a new develop-
ment. In this way we can, for example, account for the dawn of
what is called the modern period of European history. The princi-
pal elements that went to the formation of the altered circumstances
of this society are given us in the union of the ancient with the
new German world, and the combination of both with Christianity,
then working in national life, as has been often pointed out. If we
show that in this way, and in no other, the resultant development
took place, we are said to account for the later aspects of .life in
European society, however much these may have differed from the
individual elements that produced them. We can do the same for
the life of any smaller section of a people. We may explain any
given change, by the various forces, which uniting, formed the new
resultant in social existence. In the ordinary progress of thought,
we follow a like course with considerable success, tracing the evol-
utions of systems of philosophy, and the progression of science and
scientific ideas, and exhibiting their connection with previous stages
through combination with new thoughts or observations. In trying
the same method with Jewish thought and life, we find an element
which ordinary history does not give us, which is still continually
present the further we go back in Jewish history, but the origin of
which we cannot derive from any previous natural outgrowth merely.
To do this, we should have to show how this people carried up the
elements of some preceding time, by some visible and accountable
process, into another stage. The later development of spiritual life
among them may be seen to have its affiliation on what preceded ;
but our difficulty is to see what ordinary natural process can account
for Judaism out of naturalism. It is not a higher form of natural-
ism, and defeats every attempt to resolve it into this. Its only point
of contact with naturalism, as we have seen, is the " seeking
after ; " but there is that which differentiates it from all forms of
naturalism, viz., that there is always a more or less definite object
after which it seeks. Strictly historical as a nation, with real
national existence and actual national relations, there is the other
side of its life, which with it is the all-important side, and to dis-
tinguish which we oan only call it the spiritual, the Divine, as a

THE SPIRITUAL IN JUDAISM AND ELSEWHERE. 131

phenomena in their life and literature not to be denied, nor on
historical grounds alone to be explained. So far, on the contrary,
as we have materials in history, and where these are not given ns,
so far as we have the materials which the family of languages sup-
plies, we can explain the ordinary changes in the life and thought
of other primitive peoples. We can partially trace the Pelasgic my-
thological development to its eastern Aryan home, and show, in some
measure, how its later, modified its earlier development. There is,
undoubtedly, much that is obscure on such subjects in connection
with the history of Egypt and Babylon, for instance, but, so far as
they have been investigated, there appears a rational and apparently
historical groundwork for the phases of thought presented by
these and other nations. We do not meet there with a vein of ex-
perience and thought that transcends the historic, as we do in
Judaism. Much of what forms the staple of their religion is indeed
philosophic in its origin. The system of religion which, perhaps,
has most adherents is Buddhism, but Buddhism is more a meta-
physical theory than a religious faith. Indeed there are grounds for
the belief that pure Buddhism is wanting in the first conception of
all religious faith, namely God. Its primary principles of life, de-
sire, and activity are a simple philosophic thesis, and it was itself,
perhaps, a philosophic revolt from priestcraft, a philosophism which,
like others in the East, was transmuted into a popular religion.* In
Judaism, we are persuaded, there is something which shows it to be
more than the self development of a peculiar mode of thought
What union of forces, new and old, and different from those that
form other nationalities, moulded the character of this people?
How were they severed in thought and feeling and national idiosyn-
crasy, in institution, in almost everything that concerns a people,,
save in their humanity, from even the neighbouring Semitic races ?
There is a fact in this connection worth noticing, that while attain-
ing great elevation! in moral and spiritual life, the Jews did not
reach a corresponding elevation in the domain of ordinary mental
activity. Most likely they had made some progress here also, but
their records, as I have noticed, are significantly silent on the sub-
ject, which would seem to show that such culture had no strong
hold upon the Jews as a nation.

* In the present state of knowledge and divided opinion on this subject, it is
evident to all that we cannot place muoh reliance on any definite reading of
Buddhism.

K 2

132 REASON AND REVELATION.

We are often in the habit of supposing that superiority in one
sphere of activity among a people, is generally accompanied by a
proportionate degree of excellence in another, that is more or less
related to it. But we find Jews inferior to others in speculative
thought and in art. Greece, far below them in spiritual insight and
moral power, is immeasurably superior in general civilisation. This
may be passed over by some as a common occurrence in races. The
mission of one, we are told, is to develop law ; of another, to ex-
tend philosophy ; of another, to widen commerce ; of another, to
unfold polity ; of another, to unveil religious truth. As facts, all
must acknowledge these things ; but most men are concerned to
know more than the bare facts. They want to know, if possible,
how a nation with so much clearness of moral vision could, over
such a tract of time as is represented by its writings, have had its
energy directed supremely, if not solely, to one class of relations,
and that it should have viewed these relations in the way they did,
not in a metaphysical or physical aspect, but in what is peculiarly
denominated a spiritual, or ethico-spiritual aspect. For it must be
remembered that, with all the variety of treatment to be found in the
Bible, — prose, poetry, history, prophecy, meditation, practical teach-
ing, legend and myth, — the centre round which they all move is the
same ; there is no swerving from the one point, God-man.* This is
the be all, and end all of their literary energy, if it be mere literary
energy, nay, of their national energy, of which their literature is but
the reflection. It is quite true that they would have other thoughts,
write other books ; but the one special and all-embracing activity —
obscuring all other exertions, is the struggle to realise and express,
in every relation of life, this great spiritual thought. From the con-
templation of this unquestionably singular view of the relation of
nature and man in the Hebrew mind, it seems certain that their
mode of holding this relation, and their means of perception, what-
ever these were, differed considerably from those of other peoples.
They may be said to have an instinct for the religious side of things,
as some nations have an instinct for government, only instinct is too
vague a term, and covers too many meanings. The negative state-
ment in this, as in many other things, is much more easily got at, and
it is this, that the Jewish recognition of the Divine element in the

* Perhaps the Song of Solomon, as it is called, ought to be excepted. That
is more a pure idyllic poem in dramatic form. Nevertheless, the moving spirit
is a moral one, and is, as has been suggested, probably directed against the
imparity of Solomon's court.

THE SPIRITUAL IK JUDAISM AND ELSEWHERE. 133

external world, and in human affairs, was not the resnlt of logical
thought and mental excogitation on the phenomena these worlds sup-
plied to their senses. It was not the outcome of philosophy ; it is
astonishingly free from all the entities and abstractions, which invari-
ably accompany such excursions into transcendent philosophy. It
has always the stamp of reality, never the empty sound of mere
word -jangling. There is ever a glow of life on it ; rarely, unless in
one or two speculative books, do we see the " pale cast of thought."
Had the nation, unaided by the Spirit of God that worked in their
midst, producing this consciousness of the Divine and evidencing
the Divine itself from its own consciousness, as the Germans say,
by pure severity of thought, by reasonings from design, for instance,
produced such splendid monuments of religious meditation and
moral thought, such elevated spiritual poetry, or attained such pro-
found spiritual insight into the workings of national events, we
would have been disappointed to find that it did not equal or sur-
pass other nations, in the pursuit of what is regarded as philosophic
truth. If their knowledge of the spiritual and the Divine was the
outcome of ordinary mental activity, such a clear and vigorous out-
come of thought must have co-existed with what, in other places,
are the usual concomitants of mental life. If it is the fruit of dis-
cursive thought alone, where are the stages through which it must
have passed, before reaching the result that has come down to us ?

The Jewish religious books bear throughout, marks of a peculiar
line of activity. The spiritual truths in them are directly and im-
mediately perceived, not indirectly and mediately. It takes the
shape of a Divinely manifested revelation, working in the awakened
spiritual consciousness of the people. We see this better when we
come to its fuller manifestations — when the higher development of the
spiritual consciousness among the people had been reached, and the
last and most beautiful and perfect efflorescence of the spiritual, for
which the course of Jewish thought and life had been preparing,
and towards which each new realisation had been approximating,
bloomed. The answer to such inquiries, as we have mentioned, re-
garding the primary source of these preparatory revelations, and all
revelations, lies in the description of the perfect Bevealer, as one to
whom the Spirit was given without measure ; who, therefore, spoke
with authority, which is always distinctive of revealed truth, and
who declared God as no one had ever done, because He is in the
bosom of the Father. Historical reasons alone have failed utterly
to account for the ideal realisation of Jewish life and thought, as

134 REASON AND REVELATION.

they failed to account for the preparatory fulfilments. In Christ we
have, so far as we yet know, the ultimatum of Divine revelation to
man. What was vague in Judaism, became definite in Christ ; what
was local, and there was much that was so, became universalised.
The revelation of God is more elevated, the medium is pure and un-
disturbed, and contrasts strongly with earlier visions and ecstatic
states ; the human, the natural, bodies forth perfectly the Divine.
Christ in His person is that, of which miracle essentially considered
is the reflection, viz., the Divine in the human, the supernatural in
the natural, and this is the distinctive feature of all revelation. Pa-
ganism, as a whole, missed this relation, which received its organic
development in Judaism alone, a kind of development which, as
Bunsen thinks, conclusively manifests the reasonableness of religious
truth. No life power which was based on unreason could have
existed so long. If Judaism and Christianity had not met, and satis-
fied the religious aspirations of men, and been in the main true to
their spiritual nature, they would not have found the response which
they have found. This may seem to cut two ways : in accounting for
the spread of other systems as well as that of Christianity. It no
doubt does so. These systems, although for the most part yearnings,
and yearnings often after what was anything but spiritual, had a true
spiritual source, and, therefore, contained elements of truth. To the
consciousness of man everywhere, more or less clear visions and
premonitions were imparted, but these were not so regularly and per-
severingly followed out anywhere, as in Judaism, and the consequence
is, that the Jews advanced in religious perception while others have
remained comparatively stationary, where they have not retrograded.
It is not difficult, as so many have done, and as we are regularly in
the habit of doing (what has very likely been done in the course of
this essay) to write antithetical sentences, the points of which are
paganism and Christianity ; but antitheses of this kind are highly
dangerous. Marks of heathenism, from the Christian stand-point,
may be readily noted, as, for example, its tendency to the humanistic
element with all the consequences of that tendency, and its limita-
tion ; and these are contrasted with the absence of hero worship in
Christianity and the universal scheme of the Christian religion.
On the other hand, from a wider platform, such, for example, as that
which Paul occupied at Athens, we can see evidences of a perception
of the Divine in pagan thought ; echoes in all the Indian, Persian,
and Egyptian systems of a clearer faith, than the records of later
times would lead us to expect ; .and in Judaism tendencies to lapse,

THE SPIRITUAL IN JUDAI8M AND ELSEWHERE. 135

and departures from the spiritual ideal of the nation that bring the
Jews into contact with the whole family of mankind. Enchantment,
sorcery, witchcraft, the saws of death-beds, and as many artificialities
as elsewhere ; denial of the Divine ; immorality and debased priest-
craft, against which the men of spiritual thought protested with
vehemence. In paganism we have dawnings of the Divine ; in
Judaism and in Christianity remnants of paganism ; or what phy-
sical philosophers would call rudimentary forms and survivals. The
teaching of facts like these is obvious ; they should preserve us from
blind admiration on the one hand, and indiscriminate objection on
the other. There are many ways of working out the world plan we
may be certain, and not one way only. What we consider aberra-
tions from the spiritual, are not without significance in the light
of the growth of our whole nature. Judaea did not contain every
good. If Greece, for example, was an aberration, as it is called, it
was not withont beauty, and of a kind of beauty which, if we would
judge from the actions of men, the world would be sorry to have
missed. There are various forces necessary for the production of
such a complex result, as the perfection of humanity, which is the
object of the Christian religion : " Be ye perfect, even as your
Father which is in heaven is perfect." Judaism was one of these
forces, and the most important one. But the others, derived from
paganism, although second in relative importance, were no less
necessary for the accomplishment of what we this day witness. In
Judaea we see the growth of a spiritual capacity in man, outside
the influences of a very high state of civilisation, and in paganism
there appears the steady growth of civilised communities, independ-
ent in a large measure of spiritual impulses. It is notorious how
one-sided men become in all their struggles. Eager pursuit of one
object induces a certain amount of disregard to what lies even a
little beyond this. Races, absorbed in search after the Divine ele-
ment in life, show comparative indifference to other elements, even
as attention concentrated on the side of life that is not, strictly
speaking, divine, ends frequently in the entire exclusion of the
spiritual. It is well for the complete advancement of each type,
that different men should think their own mission the most im-
portant, and should work it out under the sway of such an engross-
ing feeling as I have indicated. It is this very intense concentra-
tion that makes any work a mission. But the two missions must
ultimately unite if the entire man is to be perfected. Culture and
religion have need of each other, and to effect an organic union, we

136 SEASON AND REVELATION.

must have the best type of spiritual life, and the best form of civili-
sation. Looked at in this way, the controversy, if snch there be,
between paganism and developed Judaism, is -but the friendly rivalry
of two vast powers, to lay their might at the feet of Him whom they
each, with a little knowledge, and a great deal of ignorance, have
both been aiding to bring in the new kingdom of righteousness.
The Jews were the nation, in which the spiritual reached its most
perfect form, and in this sense they must be, for all time, the human
founders of the spiritual in the earth. They most clearly saw God
in all things, and most fully and intelligently served Him, and were
the medium of a continuous revelation of His will. They were in
the deepest sense a holy people, and realised the highest life of man
upon earth, — a life of faith in God, walking by the unseen, in time
feeling themselves enveloped by eternity. This is the meaning of
their history to us, as distinct from other histories ; a people and a
history which we distinguish by the name of spiritual, to describe
the relation in which all things were viewed by them, and the posi-
tion which they held in the life of our race.

CHAPTER X.

THE RECORD OP THE SPIRITUAL MANIFESTATION AMONG

THE JEWS.

" Alle absoluten Wahrheiten Bind falsch ; Relationen dagegen koimen genau sein."

It is necessary to insist upon the view already stated, that by
Scripture revelation is to be understood, not revelation itself, but
the record of it. It should never be forgotten that revelation, in
itself considered, is a very different thing from the manner in
which tradition has handed it down to us. Revelation proper, can
only be to the spiritual in man; it is the Divine acting on the
human. It implies, as has been said, a manifestation and a condi-
tion of spirit fitted for such a manifestation. We have seen reason
to believe that man could form no true conception of spiritual facts
from nature, and that no revelation of these was given in con-
science. Nevertheless, we have recognised traces in the histories of
religions other than the Jewish and Christian, and in many efforts
of thought, that evidence a capacity in man susceptible to something
else than the phenomena of the external world. We have not gone
thus far without seeing signs here and there, of dawnings of what
may be called a God-consciousness. This required everywhere to
be enlightened and informed, strengthened and stimulated. What
is of most importance in the preceding chapters is the proof they
supply, that this consciousness is a genuine part of man's nature,
and capable of development according to its own laws — that only
through, the growth of this spiritual faculty, can we receive im-
pressions of that condition of things which it is the function of
this faculty to take cognisance of. The character of the spiritual
is such that the common eye cannot discern it, and the ordinary
course of things cannot suggest it to the mind of man. The
Scripture record is the account of this revelation as perceived by the
Jews, and as given by Christ, who was its concrete expression, its
fulness and brightness. Most people will acknowledge that a writ-
ten form is the most secure method of preserving an objective spirit-
ual revelation, although some serious questions have presented
themselves to men's minds, respecting the character of this written
revelation, and the relation it bears to the manifestation itself.

138 REASON AND REVELATION.

There can be no doubt that the two are different. The most that
this written record can pretend to be, is an historic account of the
substance of revelation, and we think it nowhere claims to be more.
Bat the question is further asked : Is it an infallibly correct account
of these Divine manifestations ; and if not, how far does it fall Bhort
of this ? We must postpone to a later chapter, another question
which is sometimeB put : How far does it touch on other spheres of
truth?

It is very remarkable, that, in the record itself, so little is said
about the qnestion of the authority of its writings, either by the
Old Testament writers or the new. There are allusions certainly,
which we shall notice in their proper place ; but they do not amount
to very much, in themselves considered, and far less when we re-
member the age and the men. It was an uncritical time, fortunately
for them as well as for us, and men were naturally concerned more
with what was said, than with how it was said. There can be no
mistake about our first position in regard to this question of the
Scripture writings, that they have a natural element in them.
There is nothing marvellous in the fact that the Jews and early
Christians had a literature. That was to be expected. All modes
' of human activity seek expression, and spiritual activity is no ex-
ception. Thoughts of any kind have to be communicated and seek
a voice. Spiritual thoughts, coming as they did with intense moral
earnestness, and concerning all men as much as the man to whom
they were made known, yea, taking the shape of messages to his
fellow men from their God, must find winged words. Publicity is
essential to them, and the first mode of publication in Judaea, as in
all early states, would be the address of the prophet himself. All
early Hebrew history is proof of this. Literary action is the ex-
ception, speech and tradition are the primal forms that the revela-
tion of spiritual truth takes. The early history of the Jewish
nation floated in the national mind, in song or tale, long before it
took shape or formed part of their literature ; and it was the same,
no dbubt, with their later histories. The utterances of Moses, for in-
stance, and the songs that belong to his time, were first heard by the
assembled multitude. The easy, unrestrained bonds of traditional
lore held the first communications of the spiritual to men's souls, and
the earlier experiences of God's people, and much of its vitality and
naturalness, is owing to his medium. Men would have no disputes,
or endless theories about the inspiration of their record, or its falli-
bility, and could have no inducement to reverence the letter above

THE WRITTEN REVELATION IN JUDAI8M. 139

the spirit. They would get the good gift with the least thought
possible about the vehicle. The later prophets, too, announce many
of their burdens orally, as we may judge from the care with which
they mention the fact that they had to write some. It is not to be
forgotten, that many of the greatest messengers of the Divine to
man have left no writings. Abraham's memory is a life ; of Moses
as an author, there is more conjecture than substantial fact ; of
Samuel, action and speech are all that we possess; of Christ
Himself, we have the simple words and daily life, collected and
written by others. Literary activity was weakest at the precise time
when the spiritual force at work was Strongest : the great eras in
revelation are those least marked by writing ; the great men are
those that have contributed least to our Bible, but have given most
to our spiritual life. But the impulse from such men, living in the
memory of the nation, took shape as it always does. Around patri-
archal life the spiritual activity played, and worked it into literary
shape ; the same was done for the great lawgiver, the great judges,
and the great Bevealer — each history growing out of some one or
more great personalities. The stages of this growth are not quite
so simple as we are too apt to imagine. The books did not drop
down from heaven and find their places mysteriously in the Jewish
canon, but must have passed through many and various transfor-
mations, as they were delivered from mouth to mouth, and then
from hand to hand, and finally took a fixed literary shape. The
same is true of prophets like Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, for
example. The prophecies of these Hebrew seers, however, would
not always have reached those for whom they were intended, if
they had been merely spoken in the ears of the people. We may,
therefore, safely say that circumstances must sometimes have dic-
tated another form. Like guardians, as they were following, the
steps of national life, susceptible to every movement that nearly
or remotely affected it, their utterances would be varied. When
spiritual vitality was low in the land, complaint, threat, and pro-
mise broke from the servant of the Lord ; when enemies without
were harassing the holy people, the watchman cried aloud from his
watch tower. These utterances have all the startling effect of daily
warnings for daily need ; they are written or spoken under the pres-
sure of actual events. We have them, however, in a form altogether
different. They stand in our collection like the continuous pro-
duct of one mental state, the literary effort of one mind ; but this
is the result of another and later condition of society, than that in

140 BJ5A80N AND REVELATION.

which the prophecies were made. The same is true of their sacred
psalms and proverbs, as we possess them. They are all collections
of a later and literary age, the outcome of editors and compilers.
Many of the authors would be unknown, but this was not material.*
The work is not, in the first instance, dependent on the authorship,
but on the spirit that animates it. This- spirit was felt to be one,
in whomsoever it was found active. Many in Isaiah's time, for ex-
ample, would have more or less of the same spirit as the great
prophet, and give forth their visions on the religous condition of
the people. The greater name would overshadow the lesser names,
and the larger light absorb the rays that came from Bmaller lumi-
naries, and blend them with its own. Thus, around the great
national prophets, as around the great national leaders, a literature
would be formed, the main elements of which had been perhaps
contributed by them, either in vigorous speech, or more elaborate
composition, but to which additions would be continually made by
later times, from the utterances of contemporary men, gifted with a
like spirit and probably inspired by them, and, in fact, what we now-
a-days call, their disciples. This principle of grouping has been
recognised in the collection of psalms, which in common speech
still pass under the great name of David, although it is certain that
some of them were composed long before his time and many, per-
haps most of them, long after his death. It is very probable that
the smallest number actually are from the pen of David. The songs
that are more indisputably his, are to be found rather in the his-
torical books. But David was to the Hebrew the type of spiritual
poesy, and the scattered fragments of national songs and odes
ranged themselves readily under the poet-king, to whom in large
measure the development of this gift is, according to Jewish tradi-
tion, traceable. The book of Proverbs, that bears the name of Solo-
mon, whose memory was held in esteem for the kind of sayings
which this collection has preserved, is another example of the aggre-
gation of a species of literature round its recognised founder or most
famous contributor. This in a smaller measure is true of some of
the individual parts of the New Testament ; in its fall extent it
could not be, because literature had, before this time, taken the place
of mere tradition. The histories of our Lord, called the gospels, have,

* It might be material in cases where the spirit was doubtful ; and that is
perhaps, the reason, as has been remarked, why pieces of little or no spiritual
import, in the strict sense of the term, have been placed under the names of
well-known men.

THE WRITTEN REVELATION IN JUDAISM. 141

however, their primitive source in oral deliverance, and took shape at
a later period into consecutive narrative, with a certain more or less
defective chronological arrangement. There are reasons, likewise,
for believing that floating records of Christ's early history, have been
added as fragments to some of these histories, in much the same
manner as that in which additions were made to books in the Old
Testament; and while the chief letters of the apostles who were
moved to this form of activity are recognisable as theirs, there are
none of these writers, with the exception of James, who have not
been thought, by a large number of theologians in various times, to
have had letters ascribed to them, which, though partaking of their
spirit, have only found their respective places under the leading
writers of the New Testament, in the manner before described.

The separate writings of the Old Testament arose in a very gradual
way, dependent on the condition of the people. The advantages
of this form of preservation, independently altogether of revealed
truth, have been felt by every nation ; the uncertainty of traditional
lore must have excited men to give this flux some stable form. Ac-
cordingly they have everywhere sought to catch their mental and
spiritual life, and preserve it in some recognisable character on stone
or leaf, that posterity might be enriched by the experiences of the
past. Memory, though powerful to retain, and ready to communi-
cate the inner life of men, would be found to lose much of its subtle
grace and force. Accumulation of material, and a desire to give it
expression and form becoming it, would instigate men to this work.
Those in whom the Spirit was not creative of new conceptions, but
receptive of the old, would seek to extend by literary execution what
they were unable to enlarge by original contribution. And this in
Judflea originated very likely in the so-called schools of the pro-
phets ; probably a kind of literary colleges where this work began
and was perfected. That these schools were not purely establish-
ments for cultivating the prophetic gift, is evident from the wide
and free choice of the Spirit. For the art of literary production, a
curriculum such as this would be highly advantageous ; but the per-
ception of spiritual truth, springing, as it does, from keen suscepti-
bility of soul, is a gift direct from God ; no mere training can help
or hinder it in any great measure. But although all could not
prophesy, every one might enter into the thoughts of the prophet,
and some would do so with fuller sympathy than others. Those
that could not invent might collect and publish what had been in-
vented, — a work of love no doubt to many in the Jewish nation.

142 REASON AND REVELATION.

The Spirit is nob given in like manner to all, bat all had the capa-
city of receiving what had been given through others, and of pre-
serving it. When great spirits are not in oar midst we recall the
great ones of the past, and are quickened by their thoughts ; and
when the spiritual power was low in Israel, and no messages of
the Lord came from the month of living men, they would recall
the messages of those of old and send them forth anew among the
people, alive with the spirit of the men who first uttered them, and
with the Spirit of God who had inspired them : for " a good book,"
these men felt as Milton did, " is the precious life blood of a master
spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life."
And their books were doubly so : they contained the covenants of
Jehovah, His laws, His spiritual revelations, the principles of the
nation's life, the sure grounds of their highest hopes : they had
in them the perennial freshness of everlasting truth, and were
of vital importance to every age. They felt that the Lord was
speaking to the people there, if only they could be made to listen
to His voice.

The consolidation of this literature into the form in which we
have it, was a much later act. The principle at the base of this,
which is called the canon, is essentially that stated by Bunsen, that it
was formed by the Jews out of faithful loyalty to past and rever-
ence for the organs of the Spirit who lived with them. All accounts
of the canon that may be imagined must resolve themselves into this.
We have no desire to enter into the history of this consolidation
or to give the steps of its formation. A great deal of such history
must be arbitrary, and what is reliable and likely, has been already
indicated in the account of the growth of the component parts. As
separate books in which the spirit of the people was reflected were
composed, so would a compilation of books be made, to meet the
growing demands of the nation. The literary efforts of the people,
guided by the spirit that was dominant in the nation, would from
time to time add to the utterances that were considered by the
spiritual consciousness to be in harmony with the highest revela-
tions of the Divine. It would come to be really a selection according
to some definite rule, as the word canon itself signifies — a selection,
however, that might be variable, and determined ultimately by the
practice of the people as a whole, that is, by the test of adaptation
to their spiritual needs.

Even without the evidences which we have in the Old Testament,
every one must have concluded that our Bible is not the full out-

THE WRITTEN REVELATION IN JUDAISM. 143

come of Jewish literary effort, bat is the result of what was con-
sidered best in it in a spiritual view. This literature, however,
must have been weeded to a great extent, and only that which was
in harmony with the spiritual genius of the nation accepted.* This
would not be the work of any one age or any one man, whether
Ezra or Nehemiah ; but like the truth contained in the books, would
be the fruit of the spiritual activity of the whole nation. We shall
have something to say immediately, regarding the spirit that guided
the nation in rounding off their spiritual literature ; but we may well
believe that it was not so completed without some struggle and op-
position. No one can imagine that all the books now found in the
Old Testament, received immediately the acquiescence of every indi-
vidual in the nation, or that portions rejected, and now lost and
forgotten, were refused a place without the regrets of some of God's
people. The difficulties of decision, in accepting and rejecting books,
would be neither less nor more than the difficulties of pronouncing a
judgment now on the books included in the canon. During the whole
period of Jewish history there were men who approved of the law,
but questioned a considerable portion of the other canonical books ;
and from this extremely narrow position to the extremely broad one
of accepting more than was commonly received there would be, as
there is now, every grade of opinion. This happened with the New
Testament, even in the earliest periods of its history. All who are
acquainted with the historical evidence of the canon know, that
our present collection of books is not the unanimous voice of the
Church. It is still an open question with some of them, and the
weight of proof has gone against others.

The question is often asked now, In what light are we to regard
this record of revelation ; and what authority is it to have with
intelligent Christian men and women P Is it to be our koran, or are
we to regard it with reverence yet with a critical eye ? What is the
proper position between verbal infallibility and human authorship ?
I shall look at the manner in which Christ and the apostles treated
the Old Testament canon so far as we have evidence, and thereafter
consider what view we are warranted in holding from the facts we
have before us.

There can be little doubt that Christ had no sympathy with tbe

* There is evident, to take the Old Testament, a great amount of liberality in
this selection, when one considers the book of Esther, the Song of Solomon, and
the book of Proverbs, whose moral tone rarely reaches what we now consider a
spiritual elevation.

144 SEASON AND REVELATION.

strict theories of many in His day, the final result of which was that
all intelligible theory regarding the sacred writings had given place
to a bondage to the mere record. It has been observed that in the
three places where Christ speaks of this question with anything
like precision (Matt. v. 18, or Luke xvi. 17, and Matt. xxii. 43)
the first speaks of the law itself, not of the book of the law, and
the last is not of a written record, but of a spoken revelation : " How
then doth David in spirit call (xaXct) Him Lord ? " It would, however,
be unreasonable to build any structure on such a narrow basis as
this ; for it cannot be determined in the first place, in what pecu-
liar sense the word v6pot is used, and in the second place *aX« might
well enough be employed to describe the statement of the psalmist
regarding the Messiah, without implying any distinction in Christ's
mind between the recorded revelation, and the spoken word. The
truth really seems to be, that Christ gives no theory on this subject
or any other in Biblical criticism. Seers and prophets do not trou-
ble themselves about theories. Christ accepts the revelations of
spiritual truth in the Old Testament, and uses them as Divine facts,
without forming for us a philosophical theory of the origin of the
facts, far less of the mode of their transmission by writing or tra-
dition. He does not, even in His more extended readings of the
Scripture, as, e.g., in those recorded at the close of Luke's gospel,
chapter xxiv., enter into details, but merely takes the prominent idea
running through these Scriptures. We need not necessarily rush
away to the conclusion, from this absence of theorising, that " Christ
was limited to the knowledge of His time in His critical apparatus ; "
all that we need say is, that Christ's object and mission was a far
higher one than the anticipation of the historical and critical spirit
of the 19th century in the first ; just as we shall find that it was not
His purpose or that of any writer, either in the New Testament, or
the Old, to anticipate by a day the scientific or philosophic spirit of
modern times. It was Christ's freedom from system of all kinds
that kept Him from any merely Jewish mode of conception. The
universality of His spiritual empire is well seen in the universality
of His teaching. It is the same with the basis of teaching in the
Old Testament, as we have it, for example, embodied in the Ten
Commandments. Limitation of power, spiritual as well as intellectual,
is seen always in the fetters of some system or other. We see, ac-
cordingly, that Christ's followers held the doctrinal view of the Old
Testament writings current in their time, as they held certain doc-
trinal views in philosophy. On none of these points do I think we

j

TRB WRITTEN REVELATION IN JUDAISM. 145

can say that they were men " raised above their time," nor does this
appear to me a view of New Testament authors in the least deroga-
tory to them. A Christian of the present day, who fully believes and
feels that he has the power of spiritual discernment promised him
by Christ, does not imagine that, on scientific ground, he has an
insight wholly unlike that of contemporaries who pretend to no such
enlightenment.

The apostles constantly use the common phrases when quoting the
Old Testament. It is to them as to other Jews peculiarly fj ypaxpfj, or
al ypacfxA ; or ayau ypaxfrn^ an expression which we shall have occasion
to notice below. We cannot see that they distinguish one part of
these writings, as differing in authority or otherwise, from another
part. For anything we can gather from their phraseology they re-
garded their sacred writings as wholly the direct word of God.
The distinction we make between revelation and the record of it is
not made by them. The historic or human element that might be
in these older writings is unrecognised by them, perhaps never sug-
gested itself to their minds. All that concerns them is the Divine
element ; that is to them unmistakable. Their historical insight is,
thus, that of their period. They betray no sign of having attempted
to resuscitate the past, as the modern spirit inevitably leads us to do.
They fail to remark, if they saw it, that the revelation granted to "holy
men of old" was granted on an historical platform, and was thus so far
modified and coloured by the media of time and place. The most
extreme view of what is called inspiration, which Emerson notes, as
that of regarding the men employed as " more or less refined blow-
pipes through which mechanical effects were produced," might very
probably be gathered from the writings of the New Testament
authors. The human personages of Moses, David, Joel, Isaiah,
Jeremiah, and the rest, with their peculiar characters and individual
historical surroundings, are to the New Testament writers very much
as if they had never been. Their manner of citing a passage without
naming the particular author, shows the ^discriminating view pre-
valent in apostolic days.* The greatest discrimination usual with
them, is that between one scripture and another, as in John xix. 36,
37, where the two scriptures quoted are as widely separated as Exodus
and Zechariah. If the human author is mentioned, it is generally in
the form, " God in the Spirit spake by the mouth of such an one,"

* This is not to bo wondered at when we see the same practice in our own days
among a certain class of dogmatic theologians.

146 REASON AND REVELATION.

as Acts i. 16, iv. 25 ; sometimes " the Holy Ghost saith," without
mentioning the human consciousness through which the saying
was uttered, as in Hebrews iii. 7. In the first chapter of this epistle
to the Hebrews we have perhaps the best example of the mode of
regarding what is called " the Scripture " in early Christian times.
From the fifth to the ninth verse of the chapter, the quotations from
the Old Testament are given as if spoken by God Himself ; and in
reading to the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth verses we see how the
Divine and human in revelation, were confused by the writer. In
these last mentioned verses the hallelujah that closes the plaintive
cry of the writer of Psalm cii. is given as an apostrophe spoken by
God. Of course it may be said that this is the Divine in the author
of the psalm, addressing the Divine without him; but it is clear that
the writer of this epistle makes no distinction between the Divine
in the human consciousness, which was yet personal and individual,
and God. The last verses are a continuation of the general quo-
tation throughout this chapter, the heading of which is " He" [that
is, God] " saith." In the psalm the suppliant concludes, " I said,
Oh, my God, ... of old hast Thou laid the foundations," etc.
In the epistle the writer says, " Unto the Son He [that is, God]
saith, . . . Thou, Lord, in the beginning hast laid the founda-
tion," etc. There is a clear human voice in the Old Testament; we
do not speak at present of what else there may be. In the New
Testament it changes into the direct utterance of God.

The arguments of Paul are sometimes based on an extreme
Jewish theory of literal infallibility ; e.g., in Galatians iii. 15, 16, he
reasons as if the very letters were divinely inspired, and super-
humanly preserved : " not to seeds . . . bat ... to thy
seed," etc. From this Mr. Lee * has concluded that in such instances
a special care or superintendence over the writers of the Scriptures
was exercised in some way by the Spirit, even in the employment
of the language used; that it was, in short, specially adequate to the
conception down to the nicest distinction as of a singular noun,
when without such superintendence a singular or a plural might
have been used indiscriminately. But this writer must have over-
looked the fact that in the epistle to the Romans iv. 16-18, the
same apostle explains the same phrase in a different manner ; and
he must have forgotten the fortunes of the old Jewish writings,
of their re-editions and translations, necessitating a superinten-

* " The Inspiration of Holy Scripture, its Nature and Proof/'

THE WRITTEN REVELATION IN JUDAISM. 147

dence by the Spirit which did not end with the original composers,
who, without much mechanical superintendence, might be left to
give adequate expression to their spiritual conceptions. If we are
to found our views on those of the apostles, and especially on their
practice as governed by their theoretical opinions, we must ignore
all critical inquiry and textual comparison ; for we know that their
manner of citing the Old Testament was eminently uncritical, as
a few additional examples will show. In the epistle to the
Hebrews, chap, x., v. 5, we have a citation which ought to teach us
how little reliance we can place on mere citation, as a proof of the
infallibility of the words, far less of the letters, and how slightly
confident we can be that a plural was Divinely intended in one case,
and a singular form in another. The quotation in this passage is not
from the original Hebrew as we now have it, perhaps very few cita-
tions in the New Testament are from the original Hebrew, but, like
the one formerly mentioned, from the Septuagint : " Sacrifice and offer-
ing Thou wouldst not, but a body hast thou prepared Me." The
last clause is by no means the rendering of *? £^7? ^!3?N in Psalm
xl. 7. In Matthew ii. 5 we have a sense, exactly the reverse of
what is intended by the original writer given to a passage in Micah
v. 1. It is perfectly true that little depends on these passages, al-
though some would appear to stake Christianity on a nominal form
or a prepositional phrase. But the question at present before us, is
the view that the New Testament writers held regarding the record
of revelation, and their method of using their Scriptures in quotation
and otherwise, and to understand this, one passage is as good as
another. In the same epistle* the author founds an argument upon
a verbal expression in Haggai ii. 6, but on the^ Septuagint version

t

not the Hebrew text, which could not have supplied him with the
verbal premiss. The Septuagint renders #T» Dj?D /VTO DJf m
Haggai by «•* cwraf , which, if it had been in the proper equivalent,
"yet a little, a while," would have spoiled the basis of the writer's
argument.f In Matthew viii. 17 we have a different meaning given
to Isaiah liii. 4, from that given to it in I Peter ii. 24. In the first
New Testament passage, the reference of the prophet's statement
about the u servant's" bearing sickness and wounds, is limited to
the sufferings which Christ endured in the healing of men's bodily

• Heb. xii. 26, 27.

t The Hew Testament writers have contributed not a little to establish the
well-known practice of textual exposition.

L 2

148 REA80N AND REVELATION.

diseases, as when we read that " there went virtue out of Him and
healed them all." In Peter's letter the allusion is to Christ's
sufferings on the cross for sin. To decide what the prophet really
intended by his expression, would be to raise the whole question of
Old Testament and especially of prophetic interpretation, but with-
out doing this we can point out the kind of exposition that satisfied
the apostles, and the very feeble light which their method affords us,
in guiding us to what we may call a rational theory on the nature
of the Old Testament record.

In forming an opinion of the character of the New Testament
writings, we are left even more to independent inquiry, and can
refer less to authoritative apostolic statement than we have done
above. This is to be expected, if the canon of the New had a
growth, and history resembling that of the Old Testament.
Although the later canon bears to be a fuller development of
revealed truth, it does not make such direct declarations regarding
the nature of its source, as the older writings. This is perhaps
natural, if perfection of spiritual life and thought bring with them
them greater facility in their exercise. There are numerous in-
stances in the New Testament where the Spirit was promised to
Christ's disciples, as, e.g., in John xiv. 16, 17 ; but how far this is to be
extended is disputed : whether it was intended to embrace both the
spoken and written words of the apostles — whether it was confined
to the apostles or was shared by all Christ's immediate disciples —
or whether, finally, it was a spirit limited to the apostolic age, and
differing from that promised to all Christians to the end of time.
In regard to the last question (to take it first) whether the Spirit
promised was one peculiar to the apostles and their apostolic func-
tion and age, and not shared in by succeeding believers, we have
the significant act of Christ recorded in John xx. 22 : " He breathed
on them, and said, receive ye the Holy Ghost ; " and in the same
gospel, vii. 39, with reference to the effect of belief on the inner life
of men, " This spake He of the Spirit, which they that believe on
Him should receive." We do not perceive any distinction in the
influence imparted and promised in these two cases. The 14th,
15th, and 16th chapters of this gospel are full of what appear to be
special promises to Christ's disciples, but we find the same promises,
in Luke xi. 13, e.g., " to them that ask Him." In 1 John ii. 20, 27,
the spiritual gift which the writer possessed is said to be shared
by those to whom he wrote : " Ye have an unction from the Holy
One, and ye know all things." " But the anointing which ye have re-

THE WRITTEN BEVELATION IN JUDAISM. 149

ceived of Him abideth in you, and ye need not that any one should
teach you," etc. Again, when John, in the 17th chapter of his gospel,
represents Christ as praying for that hidden union of His followers
with Himself, "and the glory which thou gavest Me I have given
them ; that they may be one as We are one : I in them," etc*, can we
see any difference between this, and the statement of Paul in his
letter to the Romans, viii. 8: "Ye are ... in the Spirit, if so be
that the Spirit of God dwell in you" ? Perhaps the only distinction
that can be made is not a distinction of spirit, but diversities of
gift through the same Spirit (1 Cor. xii. 4).

We are now in a better position to answer the questions regard-
ing the extent of the gift of the Spirit in the apostolic age, and the
sphere of its manifestation at that time. It is perfectly plain, on
the face of the record itself, that the special promises of the Spirit,
bo far as there is any speciality in them, are for speaking and not
for writing ; as, e.g., in Matthew x. 19, 20, and the parallel passages
in Mark xiii. 11 ; Luke xii. 11, 12 ; and also in Luke xxi. 12-19.
We do not meet with the same definiteness in describing the action
of the Spirit within the sphere of a written record. On this the
silence of the books themselves is almost unbroken. Paul in
1 Cor. vii. 40 " thinks " he has the Spirit of God, but not as if his
written words were of greater importance than those lessons which
the Thessalonians had themselves learned by the same Spirit touch-
ing brotherly love (1 Thess. iv. 9).* Nor is this indwelling Spirit,
which, he humbly conceived, supported his judgment in writing to
the Corinthians, apparently different in kind from the universal test
of the true Christian : " we know that He abideth in us by the Spirit
which He hath given us " (1 John iii. 24). We must remember
that the chief command given to the apostles was to preach — that
the establishment of the new kingdom depended mainly on this
form of activity — that the promise of the Spirit had thus, natu-
rally, in the first instance, reference to a spoken, and secondarily
only to a written word. That the speaking was supplemented by
writing, does not argue any superiority in the one over the other ;
for, in any case, whatever the influence was which men mean by
inspiration, it would be an influence affecting not the words written,
but must have been one first of all affecting the spirit of the men
who wrote ; and if the influence was thus internal, as a matter of

* " As touching brotherly love ye need not that I write unto you, for ye your-
selves are taught of Ood to love one another."

150 REASON AND REVELATION.

course, it would be a concomitant of the various forms by which
the new life was manifested, whether these were acting, speaking,
writing, or thinking. It has been remarked by one who has
brought out, in a striking manner, the human elements in the Bible,
in alluding to the supposed superiority of the writings to the men
who wrote them, " that the apostles when they taught," that is,
taught by writing, " were free from that bias and those personal
infirmities which sometimes displayed themselves in their personal
acts and general life ;" and Peter, whose life furnishes several
examples of deflection from the course of what we would expect
from a man who was under the influence of what is generally
understood by inspiration, is adduced as an instance of this twofold
life. We see, it has been properly enough noticed, in Peter's life, a
declaration of Christ's divinity followed by a denial of Him ; the
announcement of the admission of the Gentiles into the new cove-
nant, followed by doubt on the same subject, requiring a vision from
heaven to dispel it. Again at the Councils of Jerusalem and
Antiooh, the same wavering and inconsistency are shown, which call
forth the strong expression from Paul in his letter to the Qalatians,
" when Peter was come to Antioch, I withstood him to the face, be-
cause he was to be blamed ;" and Paul says in the same epistle,
including in his remark both Peter and Barnabas, " when I saw
that they walked not uprightly, according to the truth of the gospel,"
etc. All this is plain historical fact, and must be taken in con-
nection with John's statement, " and He breathed on them, and said,
receive ye the Holy Ghost ; " and also with that recorded by Luke
in his gospel, " Behold I send the promise of My Father upon you :
but tarry ye in the city of Jerusalem until ye be endued with
power from on high." Nor must we forget to take along with these
statements, the recorded descent of this " power " on the day of
Pentecost, and its effect upon this very Apostle Peter, and his own
spiritual perception of it as the fulfilment of that which was spoken
by Joel. Taking these statements and promises, in connection with
the work for which the promises were made, and the first fulfilment
of these promises while this work was going on, does it not seem
more true to fact, to conclude that, if we had expected perfection in
uny of the actions of the apostles, it would have been precisely
here, where Peter is said to have so signally failed, viz., in the
practical carrying out of the establishment of Christ's kingdom ?
If a higher degree of spiritual direction was promised to the apostles
in any line of activity more than in another, — and we do not say

THE WRITTEN REVELATION IN JUDAISM. 151

there was, — this would appear, both from the statements and also
from the special work of the apostles, to have been in the proclama-
tion of the gospel, which Paul himself here and there discriminates,
particularly from his letter- writing ; e.g., in Romans xvi. 25 : "Now
to him that is of power to establish yon according to my gospel,
and the preaching of Jeans Christ, according to the revelation
of the mystery which was kept secret since the world began, bnt
now is made manifest," etc. ; see also 2 Tim. ii. 8. And as has
been already remarked, if it were an argument from what was
most likely to advance the spiritual kingdom whose foundations
were just laid, we can conceive that it might be more readily
advanced by men perfectly directed in action, than by men per-
fectly directed in writing, — a perfection which, however, was not
granted. At all events it is too much to say with the writer to
whom we have referred, when contrasting the apostles' general
activity with their letter- writing activity, and especially with reference
to Peter, that " when he teaches there is no bias ; when the Spirit uses
him there is no human wrangling, discord, or infirmity ; he speaks
in hnman tones, bnt not swayed by human sins. 1 ' We had always
thought that a man's actions, if he is a man of any worth* are at
least not inferior to his words in teaching power; the highest
Teacher, unless we are much mistaken in our conception of Him, has
taught more by His life than by His speech, and with power and
purity by both. Without Christ's words we might almost construct
His Sermon on the Mount from the record of His deeds ; but without
the history of His life and death, we could not recreate His wondrous
personality from His sayings. So great is the difference between
mere precept and example.

We are fully alive to the difficulty there is, in attempting to
state the distinction that separates the writings which men esteem
Divine, from other writings; but for this purpose it is surely
incorrect to lay down at the outset, a distinction between the
different spheres of activity of those who were their authors.
This would resolve itself into a fitful and temporary possession
of some special grace, while the most noticeable feature of the
new Testament records is, what we may call, the constancy and
steadiness of their spiritual enlightenment. We find no indications
in any of the writings that the writers, in beginning that kind of
work, were aided or impeded in any unusual manner. There may, no
doubt, be a certain inequality in any given book containing original
spiritual truth, as there may be in other books, and yet the influence

152 REASON AND REVELATION.

under which the authors penned their work might not be changeable
and fluctuating — now infused into them and now withdrawn, in any
other sense than the spiritual influence which permeated their whole
inner life and sustained its entire activity might vary, as we find
all influences do with us. Bleek, in the " Studien und Kritiken,"
for 1853, has stated this position admirably, when he remarks :
"I cannot think that the Apostle Paul, for example, when he
wrote to the Galatians, was especially differently influenced and
inspired by the Spirit, than when he preached the gospel to
them orally ; nor that he was differently and more highly
inspired in writing his letters to the Philippians, to Philemon,
etc, than when he delivered those addresses recorded for us in
the Acts, and others not recorded, to the heathen, Jews," etc.
Nor is Bleek's conclusion a mere quibble, when he says that, if
inspiration in the writing of the New Testament were to be con-
sidered in itself a higher manifestation, than that which we see in
the oral teaching of the apostles of our Lord, " then would a higher
degree of inspiration be attributable to Luke, in the composition of
the apostolic history than to the apostles Peter and Paul in their
speeches communicated in his work." I should appear to make
too much of a mere form of argument did I carry it further, and
say that on the same principle the evangelists, who give us the
record of Christ's preaching, must have had for this purpose a
degree of inspiration higher than Christ, or as high. The same
would be true in regard to the prophets and the men who, as com-
pilers, editors, and the like, collected their scattered utterances.
As we have already said, the writers themselves neither lay claim
to, nor appear conscious of, any special influence in their writing
distinct from that which they possessed in their preaching, or
organising, and general spiritual activity. Nor should it be over-
looked, that, in the case of the letters of the apostles at least, and
perhaps, in the case of all the books in the Bible, they were written
as a substitute for oral proclamation, as Paul hints to the Romans
in chap. i. of that epistle, when he says, " For I long to see
you that I may impart some spiritual gift ; ... as much as in
me is, I am ready to preach the gospel to you that are at Borne
also." Their whole activity as apostles was so inter-related that we
cannot say, " Here the man was left to himself, and there the Spirit
employs him as a man, but in such a manner that the human
infirmity displayed in the former case drops from him." We know
that Paul's infirmity of speech remained with him, and we see

THE WRITTEN REVELATION IN JUDAISM. 153

without surprise that impurity of style and a certain " clumsiness
of expression " clings to many of the New Testament writers. Most
intelligent readers of their Bible have been struck with Paul's
mode of arguing; but I scarcely can imagine any one left to
himself explaining it as Mr. Lee does in the book I have mentioned,
when he remarks on the necessity of confuting gainsayers having
forced Paul to prosecute argument, "how abrupt the transitions,
the connections how intricate, how much conveyed by assumption
which Scripture can only make without any violation of canons
of reasoning ! For, with it, assertion is argument ; inspiration has
ever left to reason the filling up of its outlines, the connection of
its more isolated truths." Mr. Lee surely cannot suppose that Paul's
method of arguing, as a logical method, was changed by his con-
version, or that any man by the change of his spiritual nature, has
transformations so startling effected in his mental processes ; nor
can Mr. Lee think that what is a violation of the canons of reason-
ing in matters of sensible perception, is no suchviolationin discoursing
on spiritual things, although his statement might be so understood
and is so understood often enough, and acted upon in dealing
with the question now under our notice. Neither can Mr. Lee
suppose that the Roman Christians, or others to whom Paul wrote,
had all the " isolated truths "of " inspiration " before them, as our
modern systematic theologians have, which, by the aid of reason,
they might connect. If reason had this power in the early days of
Christianity, it must have been in higher esteem then than it is at
present, and must have had a larger field of exercise in spiritual
truth when the truths were so disjointed and the outlines so vague
and ill defined.

Such views as these, however, proceed from a mistaken attitude
towards Scripture. As we never think of looking there for perfec-
tion of Greek style, so we need not look for any other perfection
incompatible with the authors and their antecedents. Throughout
the Bible, in the Old Testament as well as the New, there is plain
everywhere the most distinct individuality. All criticism of it that
is worth anything proceeds on this conception of its origin. We
determine the probability or not of authorship by marks of style in
composition, as well as by the point of view from which the author
regards spiritual truth, and the historical setting of the truths.
The influence that pervades the Biblical authors is one that uses
their natural powers and does not pervert them, so that we may
have the elegance and beauty and sweep of the author of the letter

1

154 SEASON AND REVELATION.

to the Hebrews, in the same collection with the less enticing words
and harsher forms of Paul.

We have hitherto been speaking of the written words of
men who are acknowledged generally to have received some
special gift of the Spirit, by whatever name we are to call it, and
we have been trying to show that this gift was not specially granted
for the purpose of a written record ; but every one knows that the
productions of apostles comprise a very small portion of the Bible
literature. The bnlk of this literature, as a literature, is the work
of men unknown. We have shown this to be the ease with many
of the written portions of the Old Testament prophets and poets,
and it is undeniably so with the largest portion of the historical
books of the Jews. The names of the writers of the New Testament
histories, however, as is to be expected from the time in which they
were written, have come down to us with more certainty than those
of the Old. The more extended use of writing, and the desire to
preserve the memories of those who had been instrumental in collect-
ing the scattered traditions of the acts of Christ and His apostles,
added to the foot, no doubt lamented by pious men, that the names
of the authors of many of the older sacred books had been lost,
would make the early Christians more tenacious of their traditions.
But notwithstanding all this, there are doubts regarding some of
the gospel authors. With the exception, probably, of the fourth* it
is very certain that none of the gospels were the work of apostles,
and beyond all doubt, with perhaps the same exception, that none
of them, as we now have them, are original, any more than the
early historical collections in the Old Testament have come to us in
their earliest forms. They are the results of various literary effort
on the part of men imbued with the Spirit which these histories
embody. PerhapB no books, unless it be some of the poetical books
of the Old Testament, and the Apocalypse of the New, reckoned by
some in the same category, have presented difficulties so great to
the minds of candid investigators of the Scripture records, as the
historical books. On the one hand, it is maintained that it cannot,
with any reason, be held that the Holy Spirit inspired the authors
of these books, whether in the Old Testament or the New, in the

* I say "with the exception, probably, of the fourth 1 ' gospel, because it is
obviously beyond the plan of my work to enter into the details of biblical
criticism. Nor can it serve any purpose to raise, in a parenthesis, a question so
wide as the* authorship of the fourth gospel.

THE WRITTEN REVELATION IN JUDAISM. 155

sense in which the proclaimers of the new Divine truths were in-
spired since there was no reasonable necessity for such extra human
aid, seeing that they had everything that was needful for the com-
position of these books either from oral report, written accounts,
or personal knowledge. On the other hand, it is as strongly asserted
that inspiration is an actual energy of the Holy Spirit, by which all
have been guided who have proclaimed God's will, whether by direct
revelation or by written history. Thus revelation of spiritual law
and Divine truths as well as facts of history were recorded under
the same influence ; thus Job's speeches and those of his friends,
as well as the direct utterances of God, have the same supernatural
source. Looking chiefly at the New Testament historians, we are
aware in reading their books of conscious, personal, mental activity
in the authors. We have the express statement of some of the
writers, and the internal evidence of all, that they resolutely chose
materials, much in the same way as any other narrator, in accordance
with some special purpose which they had set themselves to accom-
plish. Luke, in the introduction to his gospel, expressly mentions
the design of his work, the individual for whom he writes, and the
sources of his information. The same historian in the beginning
of a second narrative alludes to his former treatise, as any author
would refer to a first volume in a second, and continues this later
history as a supplement to and continuation of the previous work.
John also in the conclusion of his gospel (xx. 30, 31) mentions
the end he had in view when he compiled his gospel, and no one
can doubt that he was determined in his choice of those things
which he recorded, out of the many "which are not written in this
book," by the plan of his work. In no collection of narratives
could we find on this point a declaration more straightforward than
that of Luke's : " Forasmuch as many have taken in hand to set
forth in order, ... it seemed good to me also ... to write
unto thee in order." This is really the manner in which all literature
grows, and we have no reason to conclude that sacred literature
assumed its present shape in a way essentially different. Histories
and sagas of northern and eastern people floated from lip to lip,
were recorded in broken fragments by many, until ultimately some
one thought it good "to set them forth in order" more fully. Any
ordinary careful perusal of the gospels in relation to each other
will result in showing a common basis of literary materials, here and
there varying in fulness, and consequently leading to more extended
statement on some points by the author of one gospel than by that

156 SEASON AND REVELATION.

of, another, and sometimes to a different arrangement.* We ought
to look for modifications in the narratives, which is only another way
of saying that we should expect freedom in the authors in the selec-
tion of their materials, and in their manner of grouping them, as well
as harmonies, as they are commonly called, in their stories. In no
other way shall we get quit of that forced and non-natural mode of
reconciling of apparent and actual discrepancies in the historical
books, which had its origin in an artificial conception of the nature
of these compositions. We do not possess those partially arranged
materials of which Luke, for example, made use in his larger work
for Theophilus ; but if we did possess them, we should almost cer-
tainly see that many things related in them were curtailed by
him, while others were omitted altogether, or received a new set-
ting. In this way incidents treated of in a certain manner by one
evangelist, would be differently related by another, and occurrences
not mentioned by any previous Grund-record, as the Germans
would say, might come to the knowledge of one evangelist and
not to that of another, through the communication of an observer
or otherwise. All the histories have marks that point to some such
mode of construction. These marks in the writings are noticed with
no intention of lessening their authority, or of throwing doubts on
their genuineness. We think that in this way their authority is
rendered greater and their genuineness indubitable ; while we are
able to see that, whatever influence was at work in the composition
of these books, it was an influence not incompatible with the fullest
conscious exercise of their mental powers of their various authors — an
influence very different to that which, under the name of inspiration,
is commonly associated with the literary results of the numerous
contributors to the scriptures of the Old and New Testament,
and which if it did not actually dictate the form and contents of
each book, whether it be history or letter, through a human instru-
ment, at least determined the form and limited the activity of the
authors in some inexplicable manner.

* The prominence given in Luke to the extra-Jewish aspect of Christianity
has been often noticed. The evidence of this is cumulative : see ill. 23 ft ; iv. 25,
27 ; x. 1 ff ; xvii. 11-19, etc. ; but the note of all these is in the parable of the Good
Samaritan recorded by Luke alone. It would not be saying too much to affirm
that the gospels display in their emphasis of particular modes of thinking, as
well as in the truths and incidents recorded, an individuality of mind as pro-
nounced as that to be found in any of the epistles.

CHAPTER XI.

THE TBUE AND FALSE SANCTITY OF THE BIBLE RECOBD.

" The letter is not the spirit, and the Bible is not religion ; consequently
objections to the letter, and to the Bible, are not the same as objections to the
spirit and to religion."

There are few subjects of any importance that lie under so much
misconception, as the question concerning the nature of the Scripture
record, and the mode in which it is to be regarded by Christians.
Exaggeration in one direction, on the part of some Christian com-
munities, has been met by an equal exaggeration in an opposite
direction, on the part of others taking the same name, not to mention
the opinions of those who confessedly stand outside Christian
associations altogether. This inquiry has lost for many minds of
the present day a good deal of any attraction it may ever have pos-
sessed. The questions involved are perhaps acknowledged to be
fundamental; but there is usually such an absence of fairness in
conducting the investigation, and so much loud protestation when
anything like candour is manifested, that any one desiring peace
and eager to accomplish some practical good, will scarcely venture
to thoroughly grapple with the subject, or, having done so, openly to
declare his convictions.* The position of the Bible in the Christian
life, which is a branch of our present inquiry, is a question which
haunts much of the literature of this century, and one that is absent
from the minds of few really thoughtful religious men. Unexpressed
sometimes, it is this question which has occasioned not a little of
that doubt on spiritual matters characteristic of our times, and in a
more pronounced form it is the same question that has produced
much of the intolerance of all times. It would be difficult to decide
whether more mischief has resulted from that reverence of the Bible,
which indiscriminately adores the Spirit in every letter, or from
that flippant criticism, which refuses to see it in any part whatever.

* Inquirers in England even more than in Germany, although the complaint
comes from Germany, have to lament that they often find, even among liberal
thinkers on this subject, a certain playing with the views of older times ; they
" make use of the Church expressions, but unite with them an altogether dif-
ferent meaning.'*

158 REASON AND REVELATION.

It greatly concerns all to have some intelligent apprehension of this
s abject that will satisfy facts, and therefore be consistent with
reason.

We are very apt to forget that Christians are not alone in possess-
ing what they call a sacred literature. Tribes in the lowest civilisa-
tion have also their sacred traditions, and those in higher stages
have writings held in esteem eqnal to that with which Jews first, and
Christians following their example, regarded the written record of
their revelations. There is nothing at all singular in the feeling of
reverence that gathers round the relics of the past, and enshrines
them, keeping them apart from too vulgar a gaze, and too minute a
criticism. Personally, we have all our hallowed objects dignified
and elevated by time, becoming daily more sanctified as they keep
receding into the eternal. The saints of the Church are poor
sinners like ourselves, made glorious in our eyes by the lapse of
ages. Men of literature have their sacred scriptures, on which no
critic dare lay ruthless hand. Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakspeare,
have passed or are passing, with others, into a literary canon.
Dante, some one says, is becoming more and more revered, and will
continue to become so in proportion as he is read by fewer men.
Men of art, painters, sculptors, architects, have their sacred works
of art, which, on canvas or in stone, are regarded by most with
uncritical admiration. We need not feel surprised, therefore, when
we hear of the sacred books of the Indians, the Chinese, the
Persians, the Egyptians, the Romans, the hallowed lore of the
Norse, or the holy Scriptures of the Jews and Christians. The
deeper the feelings, and the higher the interests concerned in a
literature, the stronger will be the reverence for the vehicle of this
profounder life of a nation. Men in all times have justified
Milton's remark, " As good almost kill a man as kill a good book.
Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he
who kills a good book kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as
it were, in the eye. ... It is true no age can restore a life,
perhaps no great loss ; and revolutions of ages do not recover the
loss of a rejected truth, for the want of which all nations fare the
worse." Impressed with thoughts like these, every nation has been
careful not to " spill that seasoned life of man preserved and stored
up in books." In the Jewish Scriptures we have all the elements
that produce this high regard in men's minds: many of their
writings are of great antiquity, the traditions embodied in these
books are hoary with age, stretching back into prehistoric times ;

THE TRUE AND FALSE SANCTITY OF THE BIBLE. 159

their contents are concerned with what is dear to every nation : the
origin and development of national life, the record of its men, its
institutions, its exploits; above all, these books are full of the religions
life of the people, and contain the record of God's dealings with
them, His communications of spiritual truth to their leaders and
prophets. They are thns, not only a literature, but a national
history and a Divine revelation as well, gathering round them the
love of all men for the past, and their admiration for the literary
expression of life, their feelings of patriotism, and their religious
veneration. The growth of this mass of feeling must of course have
been very gradual, and its crystallisation in the religions form a
work of time. Its first stages would be a feeling of reverence,
proceeding from personal conviction of the supreme importance of the
truths in the poetical writings, and in the visions and utterances of
the prophets — a healthy and noble respect for the spirit of their
books or traditions, where they found pictures of primitive national
life in patriarchal days, songs of triumph in the past, moral truths
and spiritual aspirations, appealing to what was best within their
souls. This is the kind of respect with which men most highly gifted
in the Jewish nation, at all times regarded the national literature ;
but this intelligent regard paid to the spirit, gave place to a blind
and unintelligent worship of the letter, a process not unlike that
often witnessed among ourselves, where the reverence of a few,
based on personal knowledge of the works of certain authors, has
resolved itself into an ignorant reverence for the books ; and although
it is not the fashion to read them, it becomes the mode to have them
on our library shelves, in stately coverings, if it be for no other pur-
pose than to accumulate dust. This reverence for what is only
external, although growing out of a rational respect, is generally
the product of an age little affected by the spirit of what it so blindly
reveres. There can be little doubt of the fact that the extreme
feeling of sacredness, extending to the very letters of the Jewish
Scripture, was contemporaneous with the decay of spiritual life in
the nation, and the absence of direct revelation. We find that when
the prophets delivered their Divine messages, they had some difficulty
in gaining a hearing for themselves. The living voice of God's
Spirit speaking through these men did not impress their contempo-
raries so much as some fragmentary echoes of the voice, which in the
form of historical records had attained the dignity of, what we now
call, a canonical work. So far from worshipping the words spoken
or written, where they happened to be inscribed at the first, they did

160 REASON AND REVELATION.

not much regard the truth itself which these words conveyed. It
is always so much easier a thing to " pay tithe of mint, and anise,
and cnmmin," than to give heed to " the weightier matters of the
law, judgment, mercy, and faith."

Externalism is the outcome of a feeble internalism. Men invariably
draw near with the month in the absence of the heart. With the
feebleness of spiritual life and its consequent unenlightenment, there
grew up among the Jews a traditional knowledge, which, while it
made void many Divine commandments, as at a late time Christ
Himself says, fostered a confused regard for the husk in which the
commandments lay. We are all familiar with the protest of the pro-
phets against a growing spirit of outward regard merely, and the im-
portance they themselves attached to the spirit of the teaching in the
law and history. Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Amos, equally with Christ
and Paul, have to stem the tide of outward reverence which carried
off the popular mind, and to bring it back anew to the heart of spirit-
ual truth, as the only thing worth caring for by man, and to loving
veneration and legal obedience to this, as the only thing acceptable to
God. After the settlement of the Old Testament canon, and during
the cessation of prophecy, we have a long period favourable to the
growth of verbal sanctity. The literature thus collected was un-
doubtedly the best fruit of the Jewish nation on its religious side,
and chosen as such. It was marked off in this way from other books, as
peculiarly fitted to nourish and develop the spiritual life in the nation;
and remaining, as it did for so long a period, without additions by
living men, and the modifications which such continual additions must
have produced in the national mind regarding the character of this
book, the tendency, which we have already noticed, would be strength-
ened and confirmed.* The religious schools of the country and the
officials in the various institutions would feel their position magni-
fied by the respect entertained for the writings of which they were the
interpreters and custodians. Next to the dignity of proclaiming such
truths would be the honour (to an unspiritual age, at least) of pre-
serving documents whose every word was held to be Divinely given.
There are few things more noticeable in the record of Christ's life than
the prevailing opinion He everywhere encounters regarding the ex-
ternal sanctity of the Old Testament, the final result of which was,
that intelligent dealing with Scripture had given place, in many cases,
to a bondage to the mere letter. The old Scriptures were to the

* Minor additions hero and there might, and very likely were, made, but not
to the extent of affecting what has been said in the text.

J

THE TRUE AND FALSE SANCTITY OF THE BIBLE. 161

»

apostles even, as we have seen, documents of great authority, although
they are not so often called " sacred " by them as some imagine.
In two places only do they receive such a description, Romans i. 2,
and 2 Timothy iii. 15. The teaching of Jesus had, in all likelihood,
considerably tempered their opinions on this subject. There can be
no doubt, however, that) although by no means to the exclusion of
other influences, the prevailing Christian view of the Scripture record
has been very powerfully affected by the statements of the apostles;
but those who are thus influenced forget the position of the New
Testament writers in regard to this theory, or indeed in regard to
any theory which has a scientific basis. These writers accepted very
much the popular theory of their time, modified as has been already
stated. It is quite evident, from our previous remarks, what their
views in general of the Old Testament scriptures were; but it is not
so evident that their views must be ours. We know that in every
case it is simply impossible for their views and ours to coincide.
We practically set aside their view of the Old Testament when we
institute historical inquiries in regard to its origin, etc. ; and in this
way, the question of how far the example of the apostles, in their
interpretation of the Old Testament prophecies, for instance, and
their manner of dealing with its narratives, is to be followed by us,
remains an open one. If prophecy was inquired into by those who
spoke the prophecies, in order to know the time of its fulfilment,
it seems most likely that many other points in the Old Testament
were only inquired into and not actually known by the apostles and
their contemporaries. The march of time and the growing spiritual
life of mankind must work out these $ad other problems more fully
for themselves. If we are to depend on the New Testament writers
for our views of the Scriptures as a whole, what, it may be asked,
is the light they give us on the nature of the record with which
they had personally most concern? like the men of an older
time, they do not strive to impress us with the idea of any extra-
ordinary sanctity attaching to their own writings. They leave us
to gather this from their thoughts. There are only two places in
the New Testament where any of its own writings are referred to as
having attained anything like authoritative value : 1 Timothy v. 18,
and 2 Peter iii. 15. But even these passages do not characterise the
writings to which they refer in any unusual manner. In the first
passage any argument of this kind could only be drawn from the fact,
that a quotation from the Old Testament is joined to one from tho
New, and both under the general designation, "the Scripture saith."

M

162 REASON AND REVELATION.

Bat it turns out that the exact quotation cannot be found in the New
Testament, although the sentiment it expresses is found in Matthew
x. 10. It has, moreover, been well remarked that we need not neces-
sarily join the expression "the Scripture saith " to the second part of
the sentence, which the author might add to the first part, as being an
expansion of the same thought — a sort of sententious statement bear-
ing the same sense. The second authority referred to above turns
out to be very doubtful; this same passage forming with other evi-
dences, such as that resulting from a comparison of this epistle with
the first Epistle of Peter and the Epistle of Jude, sufiicient proof
to many biblical critics that it was written later than the apostolic
age, when the canon of the New Testament had been closed. But
if this were not so, the writings of Paul are by the author of the
second Epistle of Peter only said to be " according to the wisdom
given unto him," — a description that might safely apply to any
writer, either in or out of the canon. We are almost ashamed at this
time of day to write a chapter like this, implying as it does, a belief
among the majority of Christians, which seems so plainly at one
with the most superstitious that ever possessed an uncultured mind.
But although somewhat modified, the notion is still prevalent that
there is an infallibility in the statements of the Bible, not only when
they concern subjects appropriate to spiritual revelation, but also
when they evidently have reference to matters of science and general
knowledge and the current beliefs of the times in which the books
were written down even, as has been already noticed in the work
of a writer of the present day, to the smallest minutiae of the Ian*
guage. This slavish bondage to the letter, that will contend for a
Divine gift, directly communicated, for purposes so disproportioned
to the supposed influence, is sufficiently convicted of unreasonable-
ness by a canon well known and, in the ordinary affairs of life, uni*
versally adhered to, that we need no revelation for what the " senses
can themselves perceive" — that we are not to believe sense ex*
perience simply because corroborated by a revelation. This view of
Scripture is of old standing and long growth, having in reality
its root in Judaism. The canon of the Old Testament suggested
the canon of the New ; and the feelings and belief that centred
round the one, were in process of time carried over to the other.*

* There is reason to believe that the writers of the gospel narratives, more
especially of the synoptic gospels, have directly fostered this belief by their
mode of reference to the Old Testament and their search for references to inci-
dents in Christ's life.

THE TRUE AND FALSE SANCTITY OF THE BIBLE. 163

One might have expected that the new spirit of life in Christ, and
the principles of the Christian religion would at least have saved the
record of that life and religion from this remnant of superstition,
that clung to the old dispensation. Men have not been satisfied
with forming their views on this point from mots of Scripture
alone, but have more frequently done so from an arbitrary opinion
of what these facts should have been. They have supposed only
one certain mode of recording these Divine truths and experiences
to be possible in order to effect the end designed by God, instead
of concluding the end from the method actually adopted; they
have introduced final causes into their explanations, and anchored
upon the " shore " from which Bacon warns physical and metaphy-
sical philosophers. Pfaff, perhaps, as moderately as any one, ex-
presses the conception of Biblical authorship from the point of view
we have just now stated, when he speaks of them receiving " a re-
velatio in ignotU; a directio et gubernatio in cognitis;" and a "_per-
missio in suit ipsorum notionibus admiscendis" If we ask the real
basis for theories such as this, we find that they rest generally on
the supposition that, unless the writers were thus or thus controlled
and directed, these books would not be canonical. It was only,
however, after a canon was formed that an extreme view of this
kind was possible. The notion of infallibility is a natural result of
the feeling of sanctity, but both are misapplied when mdiscrimin-
ately referred to everything within the Scriptures.

There are two things necessary to be borne in mind in this
connection. In the first place, revelation being historical, and a
large portion of the record having the very form of history, differing
from other histories only in the feet that it has a Divine element
in it, the writers who record their perceptions of this, necessarily
blend the human with the Divine. In other words, the history and
nationality of the Jews in the first instance, and of Christianity
afterwards, were not merely the history and nationality of a people
with simple national and international relations, but, in addition to
this, the history of God's people ; and thus the historical and general
literature of this people is a Divine history and a Divine literature,
and is, besides, human also, inasmuch as it is historical and a literature.
I fail to see that we can exempt it from all the limitations implied
in these facts, and Which we shall more clearly perceive as we pro-
ceed. In the second place, while acknowledging an undoubtedly
Divine manifestation and perception in prophecy, for example, we
are not thereby called upon to deny the ability of a prophet or

m 2

164 REASON AND REVELATION.

spiritual teacher, to represent this manifestation unless the words, or
even the forms of thought, were dictated to them. Such a denial, as
John Smith of Cambridge well says, would be like questioning
whether the prophets could speak sense like wise men, and tell
their own thoughts properly or not. And the same remark will
apply to the record as a whole. There are in the various parts of
the Old and New Testaments accounts of revelations, to perceive
which originally, as even now vitally to know them, presupposed
spirits prepared for the reception of this sphere of truth — to record
which, however, required only, that those who received the revela-
tions, and represented them to their own spirits, could tell the
impressions which the spiritual manifestations produced on their
inner life. It is only by distinctions like these that we can rise
above the cruder conception of our Bible, which, while rightly in-
sisting on making it the norm of our spiritual life, endeavours to
attain this object by making it the rule in all other forms of our
mental activity. By a more rational idea of the record, in which we
shall see its true sanctity lies inviolate, we can get rid of all those
endless disputes turning on trifles, regarding the doctrine of in-
spiration of the Divine word, as distinguished from the individual
words— the Wort x as distinguished from the Worter, as the Germans
say.

There is no middle ground between the acceptance of what is
called a verbal inspiration, and one that consists in a spiritual en-
lightenment, with a capacity for faithfully representing the truths
thereby perceived.* To ask if the latter view guarantees freedom
from error, which is in vain attempted to be guaranteed by those who
seek most strictly to insure it through a superintendence over matters
the most insignificant and at the same time irrelevant to revealed
truth, is perhaps a needless question, but we may answer, yes. For
what does this freedom from error mean, when we examine it more
closely P Is it not simply what we have stated, that the men to
whom the spiritual revelations were made, and who experienced in
their awakened spiritual consciousness the fresh impulse of the new
life that moved them, and manifested itself in and through them,
were capable of fully and faithfully representing these revelations
and the efflux of this Divine life to others, who were in turn able

• Noldoke's alternative is similar to this. He says there are two standpoints
on this question, "that of goience, and belief in ecclesiastical tradition."
" Every compromise between them/ 1 he adds, "is mischievous."

THE TRUE AND FALSE SANCTITY OF THE BIBLE. 165

to record these utterances. If this is inspiration, then we can say
that these men were inspired, and that the product of their pens is
the result of inspiration. But their special relation to us and their
prime importance is the immediateness of that revelation in their
inner life, and in the times in which they lived. To them in vary-
ing measure was given to see and handle the Word of life, and from
their position and the reflection they were enabled to give of the
manifestation of the Divine, arises their supreme excellence. If we
ascribe what we call absolute infallibility to these reflectors of the
Divine revelation in history, let us take heed lest we attribute more
to them than they themselves claim, or than we from facts are
warranted in doing. On such important points as these we may
with all safety conclude with Smith, whom I have already quoted,
that " God did not make use of idiots or fools to make known His
will." Yet we need not, therefore, seek to exalt them above that
degree of humanity, which they are constant in holding up to us.
We must remember what Paul says to the Corinthians, that he was
with them " in weakness, and in fear, and in much trembling."
We might infer from the various writings of the authors in both
Testaments, that they were able to record the things made known to
them, and the thoughts arising out of the new life, as truly as others
can depict their experiences and thoughts on natural subjects. And
what else do we require P Freedom from error does not consist in
suoh surveillance over all the faculties of Biblical authors as would
prevent memory from stumbling ever so slightly, or inadvertences
occurring, as in Matthew xiii. 35, or in Paul's historical reference in
1 Corinthians x. 8, or a wrong translation of Psalm lxviii. 18 by him
in his letter to the Ephesians (iv. 8) ; or in obviating variations in
the quotations of the old Scripture, such as Matthew quoting now
from the Hebrew version, and in other places from the Septuagint,
showing an evident indifference in this writer to what was merely a
literal accuracy of rendering. Neither does it consist in strict
ordering of events, for in Luke we have a very defective chronolo-
gical arrangement. And if liberties were taken by Biblical writers
in making free translations of their quotations from the old Hebrew
scriptures, are we to imagine that any less freedom was claimed
by them in rendering Christ's sermons from the native Aramaean
into the canonical Greek record? Even in matters apparently
more significant, I cannot see that the New Testament writers were
exempt from error, or that essential correctness required this; e.g.,
I cannot see that they had clear and definite rules of prophetical

166 SEASON AND REVELATION.

interpretation, or that they were infallibly supplied with exegetioal
and critical principles, which is so far from being the case, that these
principles, so important to us, never appear to occur to them. It
would be a sorry thing, indeed, did Christianity depend on points so
absolutely immaterial as these. What conception of truth can any
man have who feels the foundation going when a doubt in chrono-
logy or a question on antiquities is started ? A system that de-
pends on threads so slight is not worthy the attention of men. It
is a revolt from views such as these that has led so many minds to
devote their- time to the interpretation of the sensible facts of life
where " the active energies are not paralysed by the possibilities of
enfeebling doubt, nor the reason drawn down and stultified by ap-
prehension lest its method should discredit a document, or it
inferences clash with a dogma, or its light flash unseasonably on a
mystery." It is the maintenance in the Christian community of
such opinions, that has made Christian life so sickly, and Christian
manhood so timid, and professional Christian morals, as for instance,
in the ethics of " subscription," so much questioned by laymen. To
stake fundamental principles on a letter, or a name, or a mode of
argument, or a body of philosophy, with which they may have been
temporarily wedded, would seem the height of absurdity, were it not
so common. Because questions so elementary are never fairly meed
and boldly decided, we find ourselves, in the nineteenth century of
the Christian era, as very babes in the Christian life. All that is
really most important in Christian truth stands postponed, because
we keep dallying in the vestibule regarding mere trifles. We are so
fond of the letters forsooth, that we have not room in our souls for
the spirit and the life. We admire our amulet so much that we
dread examining its nature. Such a feeling of reverence has
centred upon the Bible as quite kills, not only other kinds of feeling
which it might naturally awaken, but all mental activity in relation
to it. Emerson speaks strongly, but we think not without some
occasion, when he exclaims, " See what strong intellects dare not yet
hear God Himself, unless He speak in the phraseology of I know
not what David or Jeremiah or Paul. We shall not always set so
great price on a few texts or a few lines. We are like children who
repeat by rote the sentences of grandames and tutors, . . . pain-
fully recollecting the exact words they spoke ;" and so on.

What is really sacred to us in the Bible writers is that which
lies beneath all this — the fact that they were able to perceive and
Accurately represent what was essentially a spiritual experience,

i

THE TRUE AND FALSE SANCTITY OP THE BIBLE. 167

whether as special revelation or personal life. All that we need
concern ourselves about in their representation is the idea of the
spiritual manifestation revealed to them. Do they give ns a correct
acoonnt of this? Have we before ns the fair records of that
spiritual kingdom which Christ came to set np in men's hearts,
and which His immediate followers had received into theirs P
To answer this we require to know the nature of that which the
writers and speakers had to represent, and this we have found to
be a manifestation of the spiritual. We need also to know what the
reception of such a manifestation supposed; and we saw this to
rest npon a spirit and life corresponding to that sphere of truth
which was made known. We have no more reason to doubt the
truth of their spiritual representation, than we have to donbt the
truth of a kosmical one proceeding on its proper experience. A
great deal is said about the several modes of representation given
to ns in the Scriptures, and the varying degrees of spiritual truth
made known through the different writers, such, e.g., as the different
gospel writers in the New Testament, and also through what is
called the Pauline and Petrine development. This may be the
result of the many-sided character of Him who was the centre of
this spiritual portraiture. That one man's individuality conld have
had impressed on it clearly and perfectly the full image of the Divine
manifestation, is a phenomenon, the counterpart of which we do not
expect to meet with in the natural world. How many individual
natural experiences go to make up the sum of experience ? But we
find in the New Testament and other scriptures, the internal reception,
and inner assimilation of several personalities tending to produce a
perfect, and more or less harmonised representation ; perfect, however,
not in its vehicle but in its spiritual import. For one man perfectly
to have nnfolded the Divine would have required a mind and spirit
equally Divine — not to speak of what we should have required before
such a representation conld have benefited ns at all. But it is an ele-
ment in this revelation to man, as it must be in everything that is to
be of any use to him, that it is not a revelation out of all relation to
him, but in closest and most intimate relation to humanity, the ideal
form, of which is Christ, and its actual form the record by those to
whose inner consciousness the ideal was manifested, and whose repre-
sentation is for ns the rule and guide in our spiritual life. The
superiority of the Old and New Testaments over all other accounts
of spiritual experience, lies very much in the fact of their personality.
The very first things that strike ns are the naturalness and individ-

168 SEASON AND REVELATION .

uality, the vivid human and historic colouring -which each part
exhibits. This is that in which they agree with all literature, and
that also which distinguishes them from other sacred religious books.
It is not the absolute Divine — this we do not and, perhaps, never
can know. It has no meaning for us. We know only the relations
of things. What is called the absolute is only a figment of philo-
sophy ; all is relative, just as all is concrete. Everything is related
to everything else ; and so in the Bible we have the Divine person-
ality in relation not merely to the human in general, but in relation
to individual humanity. The poetry is at all times the genuine
outbursts of the soul that poured forth its experienceain-this chosen
form, and no mechanical utterance like pagan oracular aphorisms.
Self consciousness characterises all these Divine songs; national
or personal history and national or personal feeling speak in all of
them. They show us the strivings of the human soul, as well as
the utterances of the Divine. So true is this, that no scholar would
any more remain ignorant of the political and social atmosphere,
the natural incidents and private life of David and Isaiah, than of
the world of Homer, Pindar, Virgil, or Shakspeare, where these can
be known. Each writer, whether he be seer or psalmist, is true
to his individuality, while he is giving body to that Divine revela-
tion vouchsafed to him. Amos, as has been often notioed, never
aims at the splendour of Isaiah, but is full of that quiet pastoral life
in which the Spirit of the Lord found him. David in his prophetical
utterances, and in his songs does not lose sight of those pleasant
times of early youth, before the noise of the camp, the hurry of
battle, and the intrigues of the court had disturbed his mind.*
Ezekiel was not uninfluenced by his captivity, nor were the whole
people unaffected by the religion and life of their captors. And if
we find these temporal things informing the thoughts of the seers
and singers of old, we need not wonder, when we come to the written
record, to discover like things tinging it, showing personality in
style, and even rudimentary efforts in science. So marked is this,
that the progressive character of the thought cannot be more readily
determined than the variations in the style, exhibiting a certain
spontaneity in the growth of this literary product. There was indeed
something besides, as has been noted already at length ; but we have
more need now a-days to insist on this side of Scripture than on

* This consideration will servo to discredit his connection with many of the
pra!ms usually attributed to him with so much confidence.

THE TRUE AND FALSE SANCTITY OF THE BTBLE. 169

the side which has produced the extreme view of an in-breathing
influence controlling the sacred penmen. When we speak of the
Holy Spirit thus acting on men in the composition of literary works,
Buoh as letters, e.g., if these letters are understood to be proclamations
of Divine truths alone, and not expressions of personal feeling, and
spiritual experiences, some may not find so much difficulty in enter-
taining the notion ; but when we examine the letters, and find that
where they are concerned directly about the revelation given by
Christ they record these things, as in some cases the result of per-
sonal observation (1 John i.), and in other cases as acquired through
written history or tradition ; when, in addition to these matters, we
discover in such works the personal thought of the author on some
of the great themes of the Christian religion, in relation to the
exigencies of the people to whom he writes ; when we find, besides,
combined with this the soul stragglings of the man himself in his
own Divine life, his temptations, his hopes, his fears, his joys and
sorrows, his whole spiritual development; when, in fact, we meet
everywhere in his work a rich vein of human experience that appeals
to the human life of his correspondents, — we are compelled to modify
our theory of the Divine influence, to some form consonant with ail
this play of human thought and emotion. The psalms of the Old
Testament are not more thoroughly saturated with this kind of hu-
man personality than are the epistles of Paul and John, and we have
already seen how impossible it is to reconcile these Hebrew songs
with this an extreme idea of external influence. Would we feel the
spiritual pleasure and profit which, even in spite of intellectual
theories, we enjoy in the many sided experiences these writings dis-
play, if they were not the experiences of men of like passions with
ourselves P What answering chord could be struck in our spiritual
life by the exulting and triumphant question of Paul, "Who shall sepa-
rate us from the love of Christ P " if it had not been the welling up of
Paul's own inner feelings, and the conscious and abiding expression
of his deep assurance and well-tried confidence in Christ P Since
there is thus a flow of human experiences in the Scripture literature,
any theory which we hold concerning the manner of its composition
must account for these. We put aside altogether the comfort that
is brought to the hearts of every Christian, by the thought that in
these records he hears the voices of human souls in all respects like
his own, now stammering, now clear, each in his own tongue speak-
ing the wonderful works of God. What we need is a truthful theory,
whether it prove comfortable to our preconceived notions or the re-

170 REASON AND REVELATION.

verse, and whatever be its nature, it must be one that satisfies
equally every part of Scripture. In this requisite the ordinary
opinion is defective. It not only compels those who support it to
resort to very questionable expedients, in the explanation of some
very natural discrepancies in the details of the record, but it leaves
unaccounted for, the great contrasts in the component parts of this
wonderful whole. What has been remarked regarding the common
conception of the great doctrine of the Atonement, that it takes the
shape, in most minds, of a drama predetermined in its most minute
incidents in the Divine counsels and acted out in time, applies to the
conception of the Scripture revelation. The ordinary notion of a
revelation and a record, is based on the idea of an inflexible plan
rigidly worked out. We lose half the meaning and force of a spirit-
ual revelation, if we forget that it was a natural development in
man, whose stages of growth are before us. We must leave behind
the ideas of arbitrariness that have crept into this region of thought,
and learn to regard the unveiling of the Divine, and the record of it,
in method at least, as unartificial as the other processes around us.
From this conception we can see how explicable it is that the writers
are so diverse, the forms of composition so varied : history, with
ballad and ode inwoven, alternating with drama, and lyric song, or
bridal hymn, or more familiar letter. Natural experience has its
historians, its poets, its biographers, its letter writers ; and why not
spiritual experience P

But there are more pronounced contrasts than those of literary
form in Scripture literature; there are contrasts as great as that
between the Book of Job, and the Book of Ecclesiastes. In the
first, the depths of the moral and spiritual nature are sounded by
the poet, and the most daring sentiments are uttered on the highest
spiritual truths. In reality the common Jewish religious standpoint
is defiantly questioned. In the second, speculative language toys
with the weightiest problems of human life. We see earnestness,
burning and passionate, an almost intemperate, intolerant, and aban-
doned self assertion in the magnificent Hebrew drama ; in the Eccle-
siastes we see by comparison shallowness of thought, and an apparent
absence of seriousness. That they are both found in the Jewish canon
is a significant fact, telling us of the human element pervading the
Divine in Soripture revelation, of its historio and developmental
nature, of its [susceptibibility to outward impressions, catching the
spirit of an age, and coming to us coloured by that through which it
passes. Many people would, if they considered the question more

THE TBT7E AND FALSE SANCTITY OP THE BIBLE. 171

fall j, hesitate before ascribing a Divine influence as direct, as is usu-
ally done in the case of Biblical books, to the writers of either of these
books. It would not be consistent with those bold declarations in
Job, whose very boldness coming from the feeling of uprightness in
the man, has a .certain awful charm about it, when considered in the
light of a human heart bubbling out its own infinite spiritual an-
guish, and throwing forth its complaints from an embittered spirit :
" Let Him take His rod away from me, and let not His fear terrify
me : then would I speak, and not fear Him." As little would an
overpowering spiritual influence accord with the religious philoso-
phical speculations of Ecclesiastes. It is too much to think of dic-
tation of thought, far less of letters in this latter book. It is the
outcome of the Spirit of God, working in the spirit of man, in an
age of doubt and much spiritual darkness — an age that saw weari-
ness written on all man's efforts and all God's works — that escaped,
however, with the two great facts of spiritual life, God and con-
science, — facts on. which the writer of this book falls back from
weariness of the flesh rather than as the legitimate result of his
speculations.* These are precious records of revelation, although
most diverse, and evidently recognised by the men who formed the
Jewish canon as helpful to the higher life of God's people. The men-
tion of these two books in the Old Testament recalls to us a feature
of all the books, and a feature which is more observable perhaps in
the New Testament than in the old; viz., that every portion is written
with the purpose of the composers, not for us of later times, but for
the men of their own time, and for a special circle in that time, and
under special circumstances, calling forth special aspects of spiritual
truth. Luke's gospel is even, as we have noticed, addressed to an in-
dividual. Paul's letters have their origin frequently in some passing
condition of the Church to which he writes. All the works have on
the face of them and in the minds of the authors, what we would
call, a casual origin and an apparently temporary purpose. The
writers of Christ's history exhibit the same limited view. There is
no conscious provision in their stories for the future Church and for
future questions concerning Christianity ; yet may we not say of the
New Testament writers what they say of the Old Testament authors,

* "Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter : Fear God, and keep His
commandments : for this is the whole duty of man." I am aware that this
passage is rejected by some as inconsistent with the thought of the original
writer. But this appears an arbitrary dictum of subjective criticism.

1

172 REASON AND REVELATION.

that they wrote these things for us, and this is that which is Divine
in them. Not, however, consciously for us. The prophets of old
did not oonsciously speak for the future, neither did the New Testa-
ment writers ; for in their time and to their minds, the question of
how these narratives and letters of theirs arose, never seemed to
occur. Like all men who have really something to say, they do
not reason about their mental processes. Perhaps if asked, they
would have said that these writings were the fruit of experience and
observation, and thought on such subjects.

While, however, avoiding one extreme, we must be careful lest we
fall into the other ; it is so common an error to fall on the other
side of anything. It is possible to see the false sanctity which
attaches to the Scriptures, and at the same time to hold fast that
which must ever make them sacred to those who have tasted the
life in them that alone makes them Divine. This life is above all
record of it, as we have said before, and we wish this statement not
to be forgotten in our concluding remarks on the proper nature
of this record.

There are some portions of the literary activity in the Bible which
are hard to reconcile with the spirit pervading the general collec-
tion. They are not precisely opposed to it. This could not well
have happened in a collection of books subjected to the searching
criticism of spiritual experience which these books underwent;
but there are portions that at first sight appear remote from the
special tendency of the whole. A more careful perusal of these will
lead, however, to the conviction that the whole is welded together
by an inner spirit, which, with perfect unity throughout, admits of
the most varied external manifestations. It is the nature of this
combining spirit that differentiates the authors from all mere
litterateurs ; it is this that gives their words a spiritual character,
and a power of perpetual spiritual application. There is in every
writer and speaker in the collected writings, an organic connection of
spiritual life. While recognising, as we have fully done, the evident
signs of human feelings and experiences, no one can overlook the
other element that pervades every part. This element is that in the
Bible, describe it as we may, which comes to us from these writers,
as Paul expresses it in his letter to the Corinthians, "not with enticing
words of man's wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of
power." " Howbeit," he continues, and we feel it as we read, "we
speak wisdom among them that are perfect : yet not the wisdom of this
world, nor of the princes of this world, that come to nonght : but we

THE TRUE AND FALSE SANCTITY OF THE BIBLE. 173

speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, even the hidden wisdom,
which God ordained before the world nnto our glory : which none of
the princes of this world knew. . . . Which things also we speak,
not in the words which man's wisdom teacheth, bat which the Holy
Ghost teacheth; . . . bnt the natural man receiveth not the
things of the Spirit of God, neither can he know them, because they
are spiritually discerned." Here we meet with the same thought,
stated in almost the exact words used by John in recording the
address of Christ to His followers when about to leave them:
" I will pray the Father, and He shall give you another Com-
forter, that He may abide with you for ever ; even the Spirit of
truth ; whom the world cannot receive, because it seeth Him not,
neither knoweth Him: but ye know Him : for He dwelleth with yon,
and shall be in you." It is the Spirit of God permeating and en-
lightening the authors of the Bible in their manifold activity, that
gives to their writings the charm, and power, and spiritual influence,
which has always accompanied them, and which separates them
from all other literary works as broadly and distinctly, as the rela-
tions of spiritual truth are separated, both in manner of attainment,
and in nature, from other truths. How to formulate this peculiarity
has been a task frequently attempted, and doubtless presented
itself to the founders of both canons. The objection to all formulae,
however, is very keenly felt here. They are mostly too rounded to
embrace all the facts of a varied sphere of existence, especially when
this sphere is the inner life of man, in relation to what is spiritual.
Its most distinctive feature, we think, is precisely that which Paul
Btates, that it contains those teachings of the Spirit of God wbich
are discerned by the spiritual consciousness of man. It is the best
and highest teaching on this subject, because among those who have
contributed to it, this life attained its fullest and truest development.
We must not, however, confound this excellence with other kinds
of excellence which the book does not possess ; this is its supreme
and crowning excellence, and surely needs nothing to enhance it.
The spirit which all these writers display, is that Spirit which is
given by God " to them that obey Him,"* but seen in the authors of
the Bible literature in its most powerful and original, and what, in
other regions of thought, we would call its most creative form.
There was a higher manifestation of the Spirit within the community
in which the Hebrews lived, than elsewhere, and, with occasional

* Acts x. 32.

174 REASON AND REVELATION.

interruptions, the process continued to advance down to Christian
times. It was the manifestation of that outpouring of which Joel
speaks, and whose perfect realisation, if we are consistent in our
reading of [such passages, we are to look for, through a gradually
extending influence accompanying the development of this spiritual
kingdom upon the earth ; for, not on this company or on that society,
not on this section, or on that, of God's children, but " upon all
flesh " shall the Spirit of God be poured out.

It is for this reason that the Scriptures remain for us the guide of
our spiritual life, containing, as they do, the knowledge of God and
His will. That they are the full record of spiritual truth the Bible
writers never pretend, they suggest rather the reverse. That they
caught all the rays of that glorious appearing on their spiritual
horizon we dare not say, when we reflect on the moral and spiritual
medium necessary for such a reception. Paul is never weary of
saying, "I know in part "; "now we see through a glass darkly;"
evidently feeling, as Bacon says, "a great need for rubbing the
glass. 11 Paul's prayers are often indirect confessions of the very
same thing, as when he bends his knees to request that God would
grant that those to whom he wrote might " know the love of Christ,
which passeth knowledge." It is no perfect revelation of all that is
Divine of which we speak; it is rather of a faithful representation,
by those men in whom the Divine life and consciousness had been
evolved, of that manifestation of the Divine that was perceived in
their spiritual nature. The full comprehension even of this might not
bo given them. We learn from John that they did not understand
some things until after Christ was risen. But a faithful account of
spiritual facts, and revealed phenomena, is quite compatible with a par*
tial insight into them, as we saw in the case of the revelation through
the prophets. They attached some intelligible meaning to their
revelations, although they did not in every instance understand the
full import of their significance. All knowledge of what is around
us in nature involves an exercise of poetic imagination ; all knowledge
of what is about us in spirit involves an exercise of faith. Revelation,
and what is true of this aspect of it is still more true of its record,
is partial. The record of it on every side must be incomplete* All
that is material must have defects, as we shall see, or, to put it
differently, can have various approaches only to perfection. Tho
ideal is the sum of all existences; We see, for instance, the almcct
endless aberrations in the forms of crystals from what is typical.

Christians should learn to look on the Bible as a means to

THE TRUE AND FALSE SANCTITY OF THE BIBLE. 175

awaken in them the life which gave birth to the Bible itself.
We are ever placing the means above the end, forgetting the prin-
ciples in the mere history, the substance in the form, the letter in
the spirit. There must be some meaning still in the promise that
the Spirit shall take of Christ's and show it unto us : a promise,
we take it, transcending any mere record, and reaching unto that
which gives vitality to the record — the personal knowledge and
minor individual experiences which these narrators have handed
down to us. There is a sense in which, as a well known essayist
says, we "recite fables merely of our brother's brother's God,"
and have no intimate communion and face to face intercourse with
Him for ourselves. We never rise into the spirit of the men who
have written their experiences, but keep hanging on their syllables,
mumbling them like charms, forgetting that we may say words
like them for ourselves if we have the life in the Spirit which they
had. But we shall never have this near view of spiritual truth in
any perfection, while false feelings of sanctity about the record fill
our hearts. We certainly believe, with all Christians, that the
spiritual teaching in the Scriptures is fitted to embrace all ages, and
Buit all times and countries ; that its truths are eternal and imperish-
able, containing as they do the record of the life and utterances of
Him who spake as never man spake, who is in the bosom of the
Father — to whom the endless past and interminable future are an
ever present now, and who perceived that which is inherently per-
manent in man's spiritual nature. A book, proceeding from the
Spirit that He gave to those whose lives were hid with His in
God, is, in spite of whatever incompleteness in narrative, and im-
perfections in style, one that needs no rewriting— one whose real
capabilities our times have not gauged, and whose possibilities, wo
may with safety say, many ages to come will find inexhaustible—a
record, which after times will feel to be as invaluable for their
higher and eternal welfare, as many now feel it to be of undying
and imperishable interest. We fail to realise the time, even in
imagination, when men shall not need to turn to these words of
Divine and heavenly wisdom, as to a fountain which is ever welling
up its Waters of life to satisfy the deeper longings and thirstings of
their spirits for that truth and righteousness, the desire of which
is natural to every human soul. It is, thus, that the best use of the
Scriptures must arise from a true and natural conception of them
as the Divine, but the Divine under human conditions. This is
their glory, and not their defect. The Spirit of God speaks to us

176 REASON AND REVELATION.

here, as nowhere else ; bat He so speaks, that in our own experience
we may realise the life and thoughts and spiritual perceptions re-
corded by men of old. We do not find, in what we call temporal
things, that kind of ordered completeness and literal exactness
which we foolishly look for in the Bible. Nature, where God like-
wise is, does not work after our plans of what we consider perfec-
tion. We find that out of " fifty seeds she often brings but one to
bear;" and hence the charges preferred against her by certain
philosophic thinkers. The sun is not always at high noon and in
a cloudless sky, nor is the Sun of Righteousness, full as that Sun is
in Himself of all light and life for spiritual intelligences, unaccom-
panied, as He shines upon us in this literary setting, by earthly
vapours, which yet to our poor human vision heighten the grandeur
and beauty, while they do not absorb His life-giving beams.

Some who think that the peculiarity of the Scripture record lies
in its nobility of thought and sentiment, say that the writers of it
are no more inspired than Milton, Zeno, and Plato. That Newton,
for example, was inspired as well as Moses, because it was much
more difficult to write the " Frincipia " than the decalogue. Pass-
ing over at present the test of difficulty, which by those who hold
such language is taken as a standard of what is called inspiration,
and many of the apparent absurdities into which such a test rigidly
applied would lead us, it may be remarked, that the view that has
just been mentioned is based on an erroneous notion of the peculiar
nature of the decalogue, as well as of other parts of Scripture. The
peculiarity does not consist so much in the difficulty of the subject
matter, although that is quite serious enough, as any one will see if
he leaves out of account the element of Divine manifestation ; for
it is a well known fact that moral and spiritual truths are more
recondite and later in development than physical. The contrast
between the present state of astronomical study, for example, and
of the moral sciences gives one some faint conception of the diffi-
culties underlying the latter. Keeping this in mind, the difficulty
of conceiving Scripture truth without a revelation becomes more
plain. But, given this revelation in the life and history of the
Jews, and the awakening of the Divine consciousness through that
history, we may well say that the mere work of authorship of the
different books, or any part of them, was not more difficult than the
composition of the " Principia." The comparison in this form is,
however, not altogether just. It looks like a comparison between
a narrative of facts and the exposition of a series of principles

THE TEUE AND FALSE SANCTITY OF THE BIBLE. 177

drawn from facts and observations. In reality, it is a comparison
between the discovery of spiritual and physical truth ; a much more
hidden matter, and harder to decide, than the mechanical question
of comparative difficulty in composition. I daresay Newton's
" Principia " was a simple narrative to him, when the data and
their relations were perceived by him ; just as the decalogue and
other scriptures might be recorded by any simple mind, as they,
perhaps were, after the vision of spiritual truth had appeared to
some gifted soul. The use of the word inspiration is misleading in
the present instance, as it not unfrequently happens in other cases,
because it is a generic word applied to various states of mind. We
readily think of a poet as moved by peculiar impulses, and swayed
by some unusual influence in his imaginative flights. Thus, we
speak of a certain efflatus awaking the song of Dante, and giving
it depth and grandeur. We say of many others, as, for example, of
our Chaucer, Spenser, Shakspeare, that they wrote under inspira-
tion. We speak sometimes of philosophical speculations as being
the fruit of inspired genius, of orators declaiming like men in-
spired ; but all this, although a legitimate enough use of the term,
is a usage somewhat differing from its application in describing
Biblical writers. The fact is, that the term inspiration variously
employed in speaking of imagination, speculation, oratory, revela-
tion, etc., must be discriminated. It has for many minds a mere
technical meaning, which is reserved wholly for Scripture, while its
wider use has only a metaphorical signification for the same minds.
They are correct, so far as they see that Scripture has a character
different from that of other books in the truths it conveys, but wrong,
so far as they do not see that all truth is God-inspired. The state-
ment of the writer of the letter to Timothy (2 Tim. iii. 16), that all
writing given by inspiration of God is profitable, etc., is not in-
tended to limit God's action to any kind of writing, but to exhibit
the profit of all writing that is informed with His Spirit ; a distinc-
tion which Is worth attending tot It has no doubt an immediate re-
ference to the " sacred writings " of the previous verse, but does not
exclude everything else, and much less does it convey the clumsy
and mechanical conception of a process that admits of no intelligent
action on the part of the man who is inspired. Singularly enough
we have retained a better and more rational use of the term in its
metaphorical applications. No one thinks of the poet or orator as a
mere instrument, void of the power of selection or intelligent action,
when, in some moments of peculiar temporary elevation of mind to

N

178 REASON AND REVELATION.

which susceptible temperaments are subject, thoughts and images
strong, true, and beautiful break in upon the imagination with a
force and vigour that far surpass earnest and methodical investiga-
tion. On such occasions men say that they are inspired ; that some
impulse has stirred their mental powers. There is always implied
in this language an elevated action of mind, a wrapt manner, an un-
wonted insight ; not confined, however, to any particular sphere of
thought, but ranging over every subject that can engage a rational
intelligence. And work of this kind is always done, not only with
greater speed and power, but also with greater exactness and truth.
It is to be observed too, as there has been occasion before for notic-
ing, that all this takes place in the mind of the men ; we want a
word to express the literary form which they give to it. The word
inspired has been here again more correctly employed in its meta-
phorical than in its more strict and technical sense. We have little
hesitation in speaking of a man of genius as inspired, but rarely
think of so designating his writings. The word, in its theological
sense, is more frequently applied to the writings of the New Testa-
ment than to the writers, although it has its full meaning only as
applied to the latter. As descriptive of the writings we can only
say that they contain this spirit. These different senses of the term
inspiration require to be borne in mind in considering, what is
called, the inspiration of the Bible.

One thing, in the opinion of some, which renders inspiration so
peculiarly characteristic of the books of Scripture, that they seek to
designate this collection of writings to the exclusion of all others
as inspired, is, that, although it contains here and there passages
which transcend in dignity of thought and diction the sublimest
passages in any literature, its distinguishing feature as a product
of inspiration does not lie in them, but, on the contrary, in the
sphere of truth which the Bible, as a whole, makes known. The in-
spiration is in the spiritual manifestations it contains — the revela-
tion of God's will to men ; and wherever this is, there we can feel
God's spirit like a living breath, giving energy and vivifying power.
It is, thus, separated from the other kinds of inspiration we have
mentioned by the object of its activity, which is more special, while
the objects which occupy the mind in poetry, e.g., and excite it to
the unusual pitch which we describe as inspired, are general, and as
varied as our knowledge and experience. The inspiration of Bible
authors has also the meaning and range which it possesses in the
other cases we have noticed. In so far as they are orators, poets*

THE TBUE AND FALSE SANCTITY OF THE BIBLE. 179

seers, and literary men in general, they will come under the wider
designation of men inspired. But this kind of ecstatic mental atti-
tude was with them, as it is with others, a fluctuating thing, and
dependent on various physical, as well as mental conditions. The
state of inspiration which deals with spiritual realities is not such
a casual thing, but is rather, in its later and more fully developed
state, a habit of the soul, an abiding enlightenment of spiritual
vision, that enables the man who is the subject of it, to perceive
Divine relations and truths, to assimilate them, and communicate
them to others. Unlike poetic inspiration when fancy bred, it has
actual inner manifestation as the co-relative to all spiritual activity
and one of its primary conditions. It is like all inspiration, how-
ever, in being an individual and conscious process. The man
spiritually inspired is not the mere conduit of something outside of
him.

Theodore Parker, who makes the comparison between the deca-
logue and the "Principia," to which reference has just been made, and
who has endeavoured to bring out strongly the human element in
Scripture, and laboured with becoming earnestness to shew the
naturalness of religion, speaks a certain amount of truth when
he says, that Paul could not have written had not Zeno lived, nor
John had not Plato ; just as Newton could not have written with-
out Pythagoras and Euclid preceding him. But the truth in this
remark is, that the course of thought previously to these New Testa-
ment writers, so far as we see, must have coloured their conceptions
in some way ; but not by any means that the writings of Paul, for
example, were a strict evolution from Zeno onwards, or that the writ-
ings of John have the same affiliation on Plato that the " Principia"
of Newton has on Euclid. It would be rash to say that John
could have written without Plato, or Paul without Zeno. These have
been facts in the progress of mind and thought in our civilisation, and
we cannot estimate wh&t would have taken place with hypothetical
positions and characters eliminated from history. Such problems are
complex enough to work on the given facts, but it would be worse
than making bricks without straw, to draw conclusions without facts.
We can say, however, that there is ndt the same lineal connection
between Paul and Zeno, John and Plato, that there is between
Newton and Euclid. What Plato and Zeno have furnished to John
and Paul respectively, has been at most the forms in which their
spiritual truths and unfoldings of spiritual experiences are narrated.
What, on the other hand, Euclid furnished to Newton was the

N 2

180 REASON AND REVELATION.

principles, as well as the method of his investigation. No amount
of induction through the line of Zeno and Plato, could have brought
John and Paul to the position they occupy in the New Testament.
A history of physical science will, on the contrary, shew any one the
absolute dependence of present investigation of natural phenomena,
on the labours and results of those who have gone before. There
is a great deal too much influence ascribed to systems of thought.
It often happens that they supply the framework of our general
thinking for a time, until they give place to some more recent and
satisfactory mould ; but there are subjects of thought and expe-
riences in emotional and spiritual life, that may be felt and described
independently of any such system. They may be mixed up with
them or they may not, but they are separable from them, just as
language is. They are like technical terms, which give pith and
expedition to our thinking and writing. With a world of systems
behind him Schiller, in his letters on osthetic culture, could say that
he was little practised in scholastic terms, and discussed his ques-
tion from facts given him in the sensibility of his friend, and laws
dictated by his intellect. The forms of thought are as evanescent
as anything could well be ; as Dante says, —

" Like boughs upon a tree
They go, and others come."

In distinguishing between Scripture authors and others, it must
not be forgotten that the spheres in which their activities operated
were different, and that the affiliation of the one on the other can
scarcely be of the direct kind that is attempted to be made out.
If the impulse which stirred them all be designated by the same
name, such as inspiration, we must still resort to Paul's distinction,
in order to discriminate activities directed to objects so different,
although operating through human intelligences, and through what-
ever previous efforts after the same order of truth these human in-
telligences had inherited and assimilated to themselves, viz., that
the one was an inspiration, not through the wisdom of this world,
but the wisdom of God. Let us by all means allow for the human
element in the Bible, which plays, though in varying measure,
through every page of it : no less in the words and acts of TKir} who
spake as never man spake, than in the historical records which
compose so large a part of this collection. But let us not be blind
to the spiritual element that plays through all, and which, and not
its literal infallibility, constitutes its real pre-eminence in literature,
in which lies its power and vitality, as in deed and in truth the

THE TRUE AND FALSE SANCTITY OF THE BIBLE. 181

word of God,— oar guide to a higher life, whose leading we can
follow with securer step in that we follow the footprints, not alone of
God's own Son, but the footprints of men who have straggled with
sin, and the darkness it produces in human souls, and who in their
writings have left us side by side with their reflection of that Divine
light, which appeared among men in the course of the ages, and
whose fulness they were permitted to gaze upon, the strivings of their
own spirits after the spiritual life made known to them — struggles
by no means always successful, which, indeed, were only to be
crowned with success hereafter, when likeness to Him had prepared
their nature for the fullest perception and realisation of that which
they now saw only darkly, but whose spiritual glory it was given
them in a measure to reveal through His indwelling in them. Of
this abiding presence they had the deepest consciousness in the
Spirit which he had given them, but which they made known
only with that degree of enlightenment attained by them, through
purifying themselves as He is pure.

As a revelation, or manifestation of the spiritual in the natural,
we have seen that spiritual truth is differentiated from other truths ;
as a scripture, or written record of this manifestation, the Bible
is differentiated from other books. As it is a book simply and not
a revelation, it is a product of art and resembles other kinds of
literature. Some one has said that it is different from all other
books, as a natural product is from a product of art. I can see little
meaning in that, because products of art are natural products, or
they are bad works of art. It is a current idea in regard to this
subject, that there exists a certain analogy between the universe
and the Bible, which is expressed by saying that God is the author
of both. It is probably as against this notion that the remark has
been made, with the view of ascribing a lower position to the book
of revelation, "that the book of the universe, as it is called, has
her page open to all ; that her language is intelligible ; that there
is no erasure of her text or interpolation ; that there is the same
genuineness now as when the first page was written ; that the reve-
lation it gives has not closed, but that ever new epistles are coming
forth, each signed with the Author's own hand, and bearing the un-
doubted character of Divine inspiration ; that in the universe we
still have a Son telling us of a Father ; and in its natural beauty
and excellence we have a \6yot f revealing the grace and truth of
its invisible source," etc. In reply to this, we shall not repeat what
we said at the outset, regarding the revelation that we actually found

182 EEASON AND REVELATION.

given by nature ; it is, however, not difficult to see how such writers
as the one that has just been quoted derive this spiritual revelation
from the natural. It is obtained by an illicit process — by transferring,
not only the language, but also the sense of spiritual things into the
natural world. The notions of Son and Father, as here employed,
. are not of kosmical origin, — at least, it has never been shewn that
they are ; nor are the other assertions, in the contrast between the
natural revelation or natural creation, and the spiritual revelation
as a record, true. We know, e.g., that the pages of nature are not so
open nor her language so intelligible to all, as is here taken for
granted. There are quite as few true observers of nature, and inter-
preters of her meanings in her works, as could ever be claimed, by
exclusionists, for the Bible. If paucity of commentators and diffi-
culty of commenting, be any argument in support of a common
origin of the two books, the argument is irrefragable. How few
transcendency good naturalists have we ! how limited the number of
men who see the more secret phenomena, that speak to the imagina-
tive faculty, and find expression in true poetry or high art! It
requires endless patience, diligence, and culture to see a very little,
to understand the mere alphabet of this easy language. Then again,
it is contrary to fact to say that there is no erasure of the text of the
book of the universe ; not that this matters very much in regard
to the question of authenticity. But there are, as all geologists
know, erasures in the text of their old MSS. ; as all physicists can
testify, there are numerous interpolations that task the keenest
powers of analysis and investigation to eliminate. We know, e.g.,
that the texts of the corresponding strata in different parts of the
world have been declared by competent geologists and naturalists
to vary sometimes to such an extraordinary degree as occasionally
to render very precarious some induction, as, for instance, the grad-
ation of the species tabulated in them, and very notably texts like
these have left large holes, honestly confessed, in the argument of
Mr. Darwin. Criticism and thought and observation are needed for
both records. Not that to any devoted student of nature, or serious
reader of Scripture revelation, the erasures in the text of the one or
the other are of such a nature as to present anything like obstacles
to belief, far less of a kind to produce sceptical conclusions. The
erasures and interpolations, if men only would think, are utterly in-
different to the great result. They seem a sort of evidence of what
we mean, popularly speaking, by the naturalness of the agencies at
work in both cases. As there is no miraculous power exerted to

\r

THE TRCJE AND FALSE SANCTITY OP THE BIBLE. 183

prevent the upheaval and after weathering and denudation of a rock
bed in some district, so there is no evident miraculous preservation
of the letters of the Bible. Ordinary laws operate at will in both
instances, and not any mechanical plan devised by some apologist,
who thinks eternal principles are gone because some letter has
slipped out of its place. The universe exists with whole fields of
coal measures blotted out, and spiritual life and truth will continue
with more extensive erasures, and larger and more irrelevant interpo-
lations than have ever been discovered in the record of it. Criticism
of the kind alluded to is, however, inevitable, and well merited, so
long as men are superstitious enough to cling to what is so evidently
the rudimentary belief of an uninformed age. The Bible has a real
sacredness lying deeper than language, history, morals, science, or
anything else in it, but this can never affect us, as it might, while we
are satisfied, with its false sanctity. Christ remarked once that they
were free indeed whom He made free ; but excepting Mahometanism
there is no system which brings its members under greater bondage
of the mental and spiritual powers than Christianity — a bondage due
in a very large degree to an extreme conception of the nature of their
religious record. It only needs a conscientious and honest exami-
nation of the Bible in order to rectify our notions respecting its
character, and prepare the way for assigning it its true and proper
place in the economy of spiritual life.

CHAPTER XII.

TFIE CONTENTS OF THE BIBLE. — SPIRITUAL TRUTH AND

RELIGIOUS MYSTERIES.

Tliis is the record, that God hath given to as eternal life ; and this life

is in His Son."

We come now to consider the contents of Scripture revelation, as
compared with other forms of truth. It is evident that this cannot
be done in detail, but only in a general way. It may seem an
irregular proceeding to determine the nature of Scripture revelation
before an examination of its contents ; for, at the first glance it would
appear that the contents should determine our view of the nature
of the contained truth or system of truths. And in describing the
character and position of the Jewish and Christian records, I have not
been able to keep entirely out of sight some of the distinctive truths
in these records. It was impossible to avoid doing so ; nor was it
necessary to try to avoid it, so long as the contents were not formally
brought forward for the purpose of discussing them.

The examination of the preceding question is, in itself, and apart
from the more material question of the contents of revelation, not
only a legitimately distinct branch of inquiry, but one that lies at
the base of all theology. The answer given to the question, What is
the nature of Scripture revelation P will very much affect our manner
of regarding the second part of the subject, the contents of this
revelation. But this is as it should be. If the correct answer be
given to the first question, the solution of the second will be very
much facilitated. It will at least shew us the way in which we
should approach the subject, and also the method of its treatment.
It must of course be remembered that in all such preliminary and
formal questions, whether of revelation or science, any definition
we give at the outset will limit, to a considerable extent, after
inquiry. A definition of a science is very often a provisional matter,
to be afterwards more strictly or more widely interpreted, by a
detailed treatment of its subject-matter. In the course of such
treatment, the discovery of any new truth in the special science
under discussion, or even in some of the adjacent sciences, may disu
close fiel Is of investigation and generate subdivisions in the science

THE CONTENTS OF THE BIBLE. 185

that were before unknown, besides bringing within its jurisdiction
the outlying provinces of other sciences previously considered to be
entirely separated from it. So that both from within, by the dis-
covery, as it were, of unknown regions in the interior, and from
without, by the annexation of adjacent regions, the face of a science
may be changed, its boundaries better known, and, what is of chief
importance, its principles and methods made plainer. Nor is it
less true of revelation than of scientific truth, that for the purpose
of fixing the province of any branch of inquiry, a knowledge more
or less accurate is needed of at least many more subjects than the one
to be defined. For, to attempt a sketch of either the one or the
other on any other condition would be much the same as to try to
draw in outline the provinces of any country without a knowledge
of the boundaries of that and neighbouring countries. One of two
errors would be certain to be committed: we should oither ne-
glect many portions which ought properly to be included, or include
many others that ought properly to be exoluded. It is quite true
that we must start with some rough map of the ground over which
we are to travel, however general it may be ; but a perfectly correct
and useful map can be drawn only by one who has well traversed the
country. It was for this reason that references had occasionally t
be made to the contents of Scripture, — references apparently antici-
patory of the after inquiry, but in truth only facilitating it. If we
had not done so, we should have encountered the serious difficulty of
sketching that which was only seen as it were through a haze. We
should almost certainly have taken vapour for our province and cloud
for its coast line, and been consequently compelled to leave its
inmost recesses unexplored, or have depicted them by imagination.

The preceding investigation led naturally to a description of the
general character of Scripture revelation, as a record of spiritual
facts that had been manifested forth and introduced into a national
history, and through that into the world history. But, besides, in
consequence of this introduction of the spiritual into natural events
they were so far subjected to natural processes in their record and
arrangement. That which is spiritual and Divine in them, is the
manifestation ; that which is human is the element with which the
manifestation was necessarily combined.

The contents of these books, although really of this composite
character, have the elements so united, that a result is produced in
which, as was shown, the Divine and human so interpenetrate as to
form something resembling what has been designated in the theo-

]

186 REASON AND REVELATION.

logical dogma of the person of Christ, — an incarnation. This is the
answer to the how of revelation ; the answer to what is revealed will
be the answer to the present question regarding the contents of
the Bible. Within the Scriptures there is a great variety of sub-
ject-matter, bnt my present intention is not to index this multiform
collection, bnt to show what is the main burden of revelation proper.
There is folly more hesitancy and wavering statement on this
subject than on the nature and composition of the record. Between
the wide inclusive assertion that everything is revealed that can be
subject of thought to man, to the wide exclusive assertion that man
needs no revelation whatever — no more of spiritual truth than of
agricultural, as it has been put — we can find all the intermediate
degrees of belief. Many hold the Bible to contain a scheme separ-
ated from other truths, and in no wise to be amalgamated with them ;
a few maintain that there is no such scheme of Divine truth to be
kept apart from what has been called the heap of vulgar experiences
and notions that pass by the name of world experiences; others
think that it contains no system of truth at all, but resembles a kind
of spiritual creation. Many say that it gives us facts not otherwise
known or knowable by us ; a few assert that it is only a positive
statement of common experienoe. Some say that it is the power of
revealing a living God ; others, that it is the spiritual action of this
power in the past. It exhibits to us a moral order in the universe,
say a few ; it manifests, say others, a personal Will interfering in the
world-plan. It contains the after thought of God, say some, and is a
supernatural law added to the natural ; it is fore-ordained from all
eternity, say others, and contains a spiritual law opposed to natural
law. It contains the religion of Christians, say certain thinkers, and
whatever else it may contain need not be perfect; its general character
is religious, say others, but there are things in it not properly religious
as well, the infallible correctness of which is not to be questioned.
It is a doctrine, say some ; a life, others maintain. It is an unveiling
of mysteries, one says ; that is to me inconceivable, replies another,
since our understanding is not fitted for such a deposit. It may ap-
pear singular that the contents of Scripture are so variously appre-
hended, and yet under these many modes in which thoughtful men
have tried to express what is revealed, or said to be revealed, there
may be a greater consilience of opinion than at first sight appears.
At all events there is quite as much agreement as can be found
among a great majority, who unite in saying that the Bible contains
all that is necessary for man's salvation, — a medicinal recipS, as

THE CONTENTS OP THE BIBLE. 187

some one calls it, for diseased souls; for we have to learn what is
thought to be necessary for this purpose. We all know, e.g., how rash
some good men are, and how they persist in perilling* their own
soul, and the souls of others, on what looks to many an utterly
insignificant point. And then we hare to understand in what
salvation itself consists, for there is as much difficulty attending the
statement of this apparently elementary matter, as there is about
the contents of Scripture. The idea of salvation suggests very dif-
ferent things to different minds. To many it only means a happy and
magical escape from some awful and endless horror; to others it
means a progression of our higher life, through some definite agency,
to an ultimate perfection. Between these two extremes there are
many grades of opinion distinct enough to give rise to various
ideas regarding the means of reaching this final goal, or of avoiding
the hated calamity, and consequently to originate specific conceptions
of the contents of Scripture revelation, even if these contents be
considered by all to include what is necessary for salvation. Al-
though the contents of the Bible be defined by the same words, it is
' very evident that the difference between those who agree upon the
formula may be as great as that between them and any of those who
regard its contents in the various ways previously mentioned.

It is scarcely a legitimate thing to determine the contents of
any book, or other object from the name we may chance to give it
unless indeed the name sum up these contents. If the name be thus
connotative, the explanation of the contents from it is merely a
retranslation of the name, or a writing of it in full. It is from such
a position that we have the contents of the Bible described as the
removal of a veil which had hidden God from man. But revelation
has a double meaning, which is not always sufficiently attended to.
It signifies both the revelation made to men, and the written account
of that revelation. Now it is quite evident that the description of
revelation as an unveiling may be true to the full of the first mean-
ing, and only to a certain extent true of the second. It is with the
second meaning, however, that we have at present to do, not revela-
tion itself nor the contents of it, but the contents of a written
account of it. These contents have a character which separates them
very widely from the contents of most sacred books. There is an
undoubted unity pervading them, but there is an inequality quite

* I do not, of course, mean that the peril is actual, but that the excellent men
to whom I allude think it so.

188 BEA80N AND REVELATION.

as decided. No one would oontend that they are all alike impor-
tant on the special subject which is apparent in all oV nearly all
the parts. We can as little imagine any one conceiving them as an
unmixed account of spiritual revelation. What we call Scripture
revelation is a very extensive literature extending over many cen-
turies, and showing marks of its successive stages. There is a certain
mechanical notion prevalent regarding Scripture which very much
obscures any true idea of its contents. It is astonishing to find even
Leasing arguing from this standpoint. He makes revealed religion
equal to positive law, and then holds all so-called revealed religions
equally false and equally true : equally true, because necessary to a
harmony of social and public religion ; equally false, because all limit-
ing what he calls natural religion. The best revealed religion he
thinks is that which contains least conventional additions. The
fundamental position here is the non-naturalness of revealed religion,
— a position which it need hardly be said has been supplied to Leasing,
not from philosophical but Christian schools, and it is a position
still strenuously held by Christian thinkers. No one who reads
Scripture with any degree of attention, and marks the progress of
its truth, and the various matters with which it is commingled, can
leave it with a feeling of its conventionality. It is as truly a
natural outgrowth of the spirit of man, as any human development
elsewhere seen or known. The only sense in which it can be said
to be not natural is, that it is not a conclusion from nature, as
generally understood by that term. It is natural in the sense
opposed to conventional, however, in so far as it is in accordance with
the constitution of man. What strikes one, the longer one reads the
Bible, is its extreme naturalness, and its resemblance, in this respect,
to all God's works. There is the like growth, the like principle of
evolution ; the same clear consecutiveness and unity of life, from
low to higher. Other religions known to us went through certain
stages which might be said in a sense to depend on each other ;
but their dependence does not appear one of successive advances
but rather of cycles. Many of them instead of progressing have,
within experience, gone backwards. This stream, however, whose
beginning we have seen in what afterwards became the Jewish na-
tion, has flowed steadily onwards through the ages, gathering
volume as it went. Now the Scripture is the account of this ad-
vance, an evidently faithful history of those several developments.

One other thing to be noticed, affecting the question of Scripture
contents almost as much as that which we have just mentioned, and

SPIRITUAL TRUTH AND RELIGIOUS MYSTERIES. 189

in some measure bound up with it, is the violent manner in which
we are in the habit of separating our religious life, and consequently
the religious life and thought of former times, from our ordinary
life and thought. This is most unnatural and false, and cannot but
produce erroneous views. Its effects on religious life will after-
wards require to be noticed ; but its effect on religious thought is
not unimportant. It is impossible for spiritual life thus to manifest
itself. It must have relations in which to operate. If this be so—
if we cannot have, as it has been put somewhere, religion in vacuo,
it is not at all likely that we shall have its history recorded inde-
pendent of all relations. The Jews were a religious people, but
they were men with eyes for the outside world, with relations to
each other and to other people ; all implying actions and experiences
in which the religious forces would be operative. The consequence
of these two facts would be that Scripture revelation must shew an
evolution in what is its special subject, and that it will also con-
tain other elements necessarily mingled with that special subject
Hooker expresses the first consequence, in the only language that
his time admitted, when he says, in reference to some supposed moral
difficulties in the Old Testament, " If the end for which laws were
made should cease, the laws cease ; if the same subject or matter
does not remain, although the end remain, even this is sufficient
to cause a change: and therefore a law, although ordained by God
Himself, and the end for which it ordained continue, may, not
withstanding, cease, if by alteration of persons or times it be found
insufficient to attain unto such ends." All this simply means that
there is an adaptation of some kind in revelation. Perhaps the way
in which it would be stated now would be from the side of man,
and not from that of God : that the spiritual manifestation was per*
ceived by man only bo far as his inner spiritual life was capable of
Buch apprehension. But whichever way we may state it, the result
as to the contents of the Bible is the same.

The second consequence of the above facts is beginning to be felt
more and more, and is endeavoured to be formulated by the distinc-
tion between what is essential and non-essential in the Scriptures*
Directly we have what is essential ; indirectly we have much that is
not so. What the non-essentials in the Scriptures are, we shall con-
sider in a future chapter. The direct communications in the Bible
are, of course, those which most concern us, as they are the contents
which must always be its distinguishing characteristic.

All the definitions that have been given of the distinctive contents

190 BEASON AND REVELATION.

of this book agree in saying that their general character is religions,
whether this be the religions experiences of man subjectively, or
objectively considered. The difficulty here is as to what is specially
religions; some including nnder it a whole system of truths, par-
taking more or less of the nature of mysteries, while others hold
it to mean simply a higher morality. The Bible, as a series of books
about religion, may have mysteries, what has not ? bnt its essential
contents cannot be mysterious in the sense that we can in no way
apprehend them, while we must accept them. There has been no
greater harm done to religion than that committed by its friends
when they insist upon its essential mysterionsness. And the mistake
is equal to the mischief done. The contents of revelation are never
and nowhere represented as a mystery. The fulness of revelation
is generally supposed to be found in Christ ; but where in any teach-
ing is there such lucidity ? He cleared away a good deal of the
mystery that perverse thinking had created. He let in much light
upon men's minds; at no point does He increase the darkness. He
was emphatically the light shining in a dark place : the light of
the world that lighteth every man that cometh into it. A New
Testament writer, it is true, exclaims, " Great is the mystery of god-
liness!" but the most materialistic thinker and most thorough-
going positivist will equally exclaim on the mystery of many things
around him. Christ, too, speaks of it being given to His disciples
to know the mysteries of His kingdom, but this has plainly refer-
ence to the form in which He clothed this teaching. There are also
mysteries spoken of in the Bible which have been designated by
some the mysteries of art, such as those called by Zophar (Job
xi. 6), " the secrets of wisdom," and those in the Apocalypse of
John. And besides these there are, as we have said, mysteries in
revelation just as there are mysteries around us everywhere. Any
one with their spiritual vision quickened, and their moral sensibility
awakened in a manner similar to the apostles of Christ, must have
felt difficulties pressing upon them, which were to them new mys-
teries in the best sense of that word. The man who sees most
mystery in life around him is the man with delicate susceptibilities,
and powers of observation most highly] cultured. By such a one
the feeling of Paul must frequently be realised. Paul, more than
any apostle or Bible writer, speaks thus of Christian truth ; a man-
ner of speech which is to be explained in a great measure by his
mode of looking at Christian life. He more than any other made
it the subject of intellectual contemplation. He viewed it in its re-

SPIRITUAL TRUTH AND RELIGIOUS MYSTERIES. 191

lations to the past, and thus spoke of the mystery kept secret since
the world began. He felt the strong opposition it would meet with
in the immediate future, and spoke of the mystery of iniquity which
shaped itself to his mind. He rejoiced in a hope that often sustained
him in his own daily struggles, and which he communicates to the
Corinthians: "Behold, I shew you a mystery: we shall not all
sleep." A distinction must, however, be made between these so-
called mysteries, and revelation proper. These seem to be rather the
consequences of revelation than the essential contents of it. In
itself spiritual truth is clear as noon-day ; otherwise one fails to see
the force of its general presentation to mankind, and its special
adaptation to the poor and the unlearned. It ought to be observed
that Paul does not try to explain the mysteries he speaks about ; he
saw them, but the explanation of them might still be in the distant
future. They were mysteries to him as well as other men, but first
clearly observed as such and stated by him.

We are very far from seeking to make out that all the contents of
Scripture and their consequences are so plain, that he may run who
readeth them. They require more steady conning than they have
ever yet received, in order to know and understand them fully ; but
every one must be greatly concerned to shew that what is vital in
them is written in the largest and plainest letters. He who will
have the Bible free of all mystery had first clear the world of such.
The opinion of Henry More appears very near the truth, " that
those who contend for absolute clearness in all parts of religion shew
more clownishness than judgment, and their zeal not so much for
truth as out of pride and vainglory ; they taking it very ill that
anything in the mystery of godliness should be so mysterious as
that their conceited reason cannot comprehend it." We need not
be among those, however, whom he says, "brood over that they
know not and slight that they know." " What makes matter," as
he exclaims, " though the bottom of the well be fathomless, if the
water we reach be but pure and useful." It is this " pure and
useful " water which concerns us. The well may be fathomless — we
believe it is, — but at any rate the water is attainable, else we should
never have heard the cry, "If any man thirst, let him come unto Me,
and drink." We must first drink of this living water if we are to live ;
and then there may come skill and leisure to take soundings of the
"great deep." In common experience speculation surely follows
existence. We feel the sun's beams, and are warmed and gladdened
by them many a day before we ever think of analysing them or in-

192 SEASON AND REVELATION.

vestigating their source. Physical life itself is a mystery, but the
means for sustaining it are not dependent on our solution of this
enigma. Spiritual life is a mystery, but there needs no explanation
of the mystery in order to become sharers in the life. We behold
in sunbeams God Himself revealed in His relation of love to man in
Jesus : " and this is life eternal, that they might know Thee, the
only true Ood, and Jesus Christ whom Thou has sent." A great
mystery certainly, who doubts ? but is it not a mystery to a mind
of ordinary susceptibility, to look round upon this earth, and into
the new depths and receding distances of the midnight sky, and
think, What a child I am, and what a world I'm in ! And as the
mystery is, not that the world is there and the heavens are there,
but how they are there, so the mystery is, not that God is there and
Christ is there, but how they are there.

That which is the special content of Scripture revelation from
first to last, is the knowledge of Ood in relation to man. We have
this in a clear historical development in the Jewish nation, the faint
consciousness of it growing clearer and clearer. Occasional obscur-
ations are evident, but on the whole, as we have seen, there is a
steady advance in this knowledge until the time of Christ, who was
to reveal the Father as no preceding prophet had done. His pur-
pose (and we see how it was fulfilled) was to declare God's name :
that is, not the mere declaration that there is a God — this had been
declared again and again, but to declare the character and will
of Ood, as revealed in His own life and death. It is not a teleo-
logy that the Bible contains, and which we have seen reason to
believe was the character of much of what the modern interpretation
of mythology gives us as a knowledge of Ood, prevalent among all
the great Aryan nations as well as the Semitic. Mythologists refer
us impressively to the names deva, daeva, deus, dcva-s, deiwa-s, dia,
in Sanscrit, Zend, Latin, Lithuanian, Old Prussian, and Old Irish ;
but we have not yet seen it proved that this widespread name cor*
responded to much more than an extended generalisation of sense
experience. The knowledge of Ood in Christ is as different as
possible from this. Ontology and theology, or the knowledge of
Ood, are not convertible terms, as is too often taken for granted.
The revelation of God in the Bible, is a revelation which no teleo-
logical conclusions yet brought forward have ever approached. If
not different in kind, there is an infinite difference in degree between
them. It is a favourite notion with some theologians that the ra*
tionalist, as he is called, will find at his furthest advance that he has

SPIRITUAL TRUTH AND RELIGIOUS MYSTERIES.

193

been approaching by a direct; path to the threshold of revelation.
This may be the rase, but it certainly is not demonstrable. So
far indeed from the sphere of truth contained in the Bible being the
summit of rational truth, as yet to every appearance it is separated
from the latter by a chaotic world, which men can only call " the
void and formless infinite," the incomprehensible, the insoluble, or
by any other meaningless negation. The most that we can say con-
cerning this, independently of revelation and its methods, is, We feel
the shadow of something brooding over ub wherever we advance ; or,
better still, as has been imagined by Dr. Arnold, " This pyramid [of
knowledge], like the unfinished tower of Babel, can never reach God.
It stands for ever manifestly incomplete, yet incapable of being com*
pie ted, for the power that reared the rest of the fabric cannot find
nor lay in its place that last and crowning stone." Teleology has
never been but barren ; the knowledge of God in Christ is, on the
contrary, generative of spiritual life.

" Ye search the Scriptures," Christ said to the Jews ; " for in them
ye think ye have eternal life, and they are they which testify of Me."
That is the true description of Scripture contents, a witness to Christ,
who is a witness to God. The purpose of this we have in Christ's
own words, " I have declared unto them Thy name, . . . that
the love wherewith Thou hast loved Me may be in them, and I in
them." It is thus a record of the manifestation of the moral and
spiritual nature of God, to the end that we may become partakers
of His Spirit. This was the burden of all the old Testament re-
velations by lawgivers and prophets. Imperfect though they were,
and though the men were never wearied of confessing their imper-
fections, they led up to that perfect declaration of God's will which
Christ gave in His teaching and action, and for which the older
prophets, from Moses downwards, longed ; some for the greater pro-
phet, others for the typical revelation, when the law was to be
written in men's hearts, and in no statute book : a law that was not
to be what men call a law of necessity, but in the highest sense a
law of liberty. Christ came, and with a clearness and precision that
had never been witnessed, spoke and acted according to this law of
liberty, that we might live in the same freedom. His revelation was
an embodiment of what the Hebrew mind faintly saw, what the Ar-
yan mind in its spiritual aspect we think never can with confidence
be said to have seen — of the life of Sonship in God.* The freedom

* This is the explanation of the directness of Christ's revelation as compared

o

104 REASON AND REVELATION.

of His spiritual life lay in the harmony of His will with tho Father's :
the consequence and partly the condition of which was, that He had
the Spirit without measure. Christ knew that He had the Father,
and we also know that He abideth in us by the Spirit which He
hath given us, — a Spirit which was seen revealed in the Son of God
in all its fulness — which is everywhere in the world, although not
perceived — the Spirit of God's love. Through this manifestation
" we have known and believed the love that God hath to us. God is
love ; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in
him." The late Mr. Thomas Erskine seizes the distinctive content
of Scripture when he says, the gospel is not "he that believeth
shall be saved," but " God so loved the world that He sent His Son."
As John says, "The Son of God is come, and hath given us an under-
standing, that we may know Him that is true." We have God's
love made known to us, that it may be perfected in us as it was in
Christ."

The Bible is thus not in any sense specially concerned with what
is not unfrequently imagined to be distinctively its message to man,
viz., a revelation of immortality, in the sense in which this is com-
monly taken. As a doctrine and belief, immortality is almost, if not
entirely, universal. The most barbarous tribes believe in some kind
of life after death, and a great part, in some cases the only part, of
their religion is concerned with acts of worship that have reference
to their departed friends, who are firmly believed to exist in the
unseen. Among the wildest American tribes ; in Polynesia, Africa,
China, India, as well as Egypt, and Greece, and in all with greater
distinctness, and far more 1 certainty of proof than among the Jews,
this belief was prevalent. As has been said, it seems often strongest
where intellectual culture and moral life is lowest ; at least, it is not
evidently dependent upon the purity of a spiritual religion, and
never can be a criterion of an undoubted "spiritual religion like
Christianity. The vividness with which the Norsemen pictured
their abodes of bliss, the realism manifested by still existing peo-
ples in their descriptions of the journey, over perilous bridges and
slippery passes, of the disembodied soul to its new abode, equal any-
thing that Bunyan has written of his famous Pilgrim's progress to
the Christian heaven. Where men have no other belief that is pecu-
liarly religious, they cling tenaciously to this. Instead of its being

with that of tho prophets, and the occasional declaration of its indirectness : " I
speak not of Myself."

SPIRITUAL TRUTH AND RELIGIOUS MYSTERIES. 195

the ultimate revelation in religion, it seems an elementary conception
of the uncultured man. It is with some such popular view of re-
ligion in his own mind that Leasing urges the reason against astro-
logy as a valid reason against revealed religion. "If it were indeed
true/ 1 he says, " that there were an art (such as astrology) to know
the future, we would rather not learn this art ; although it were true
that there was a religion which apprised us quite undoubtedly of
that life, we would rather give no ear to that religion." One is at
first surprised that a philosopher should regard the Bible as contain*
ing anything like an astrology of the spiritual life, in view of Christ's
declaration concerning the knowledge of a future event ; and yet
Lessing was not simply drawing a caricature. The declaration I
allude to is the following : " But of that day and hour knoweth no
man; no, not the angels of heaven, but My Father only." The Bible
contains no disclosure of world secrets; in the spiritual as elsewhere,
we must find out such by diligent investigation and prolonged ex-
perience, and not by consultation of a written oracle. The contrary
of this, however, is a common enough opinion, regarding Scripture
contents, although it may not always be displayed in the same man-
ner. While some hold it a kind of repertory for an astrology of a
life beyond life, others look upon it as furnishing data from which
we may descry events yet distant in modern society. This must
have been something like Sir Isaac Newton's conception of, at least,
some portions of it ; and one cannot help being amazed to find a
man like Dr. Chalmers supporting the view as he does in his " Lec-
tures on the Romans," on the ground of a false analogy. Speaking
of Newton, he says, " After having looked, and with steadfastness,
for years on the face of heaven, and evolved thenceforth the mag-
nificent cycles of astronomy, he then turned him to Scripture, and
found in the midst of its now unrivalled obscurities, that its cycles
of prophecy were equally magnificent; and whether he oast his
regards on the book of Revelation or on the book of Daniel, who^
placed on the eminence of a sublime antiquity, looked through the
vista of many descending ages and eyed from afar the structure of
modern Europe," etc. Modern criticism makes very short work with
this supposed "eminence" of "sublime antiquity," when it turns
these " orbits of the spiritual economy " into the dramatic efforts of
artistic and spiritual minds. But, even granting them to be the
prophetic utterances of the men whose names they bear, we are
very far from the somewhat astrological position of Newton and
Chalmers; we are all the way between the horoscopic view of

o 2

196 EEA80N AND EEVELATION.

stellar phenomena and pare astronomical science, between reading
fortunes and demonstrating principles. Neither Newton, nor Chal-
mers, nor Dr, Cumming with all the most recent improvements,
will find out from Scripture on their very literal method half as
much of the future as a trained and expert sociologist. It is not
by uncritical reading of a book, but by reading the signs of the
times in the light of principles gathered from the experiences of the
past, that we can make out in a dim outline the form of the near
future. Of the result of principles in spiritual life working in certain
conditions, any one with the requisite experience may confidently
speak, but of the day and the hour and the place no one can tell,
unless by a process of self-delusion which is lamentable to think of.
The apostles had a slight inclination to this kind of thing ; but it did
not, according to almost universal acknowledgment, come to very
much even in their hands. Their announcements of the second
coming of Christ turned out to be a decided mistake.

The conception of the Bible as a sure basis for astrological obser-
vations on a future life has done as much harm to religious life and
character, as the conception of prophecy, of which we have just
spoken has done to religious knowledge and Biblical interpretation.
Christ never affected any more than the Old Testament writers to
open up the world beyond the grave, — not but that it was opened
in a measure by both.* He came to reveal a spiritual life which
should be in us now — that life of which I have spoken — hidden with
Him in God. He " hath given to us eternal life, and this life is in
His Son." This is a life, then, like the Son's : a life, therefore,
whose meat and drink is to do God's will like Him. A man once
came to Christ saying, " Good Master, what good thing shall I do
that I may inherit eternal life P " This man was prompted by an
irresistible desire which is found in the breasts of all mankind, for
what they think an enduring existence, an undying inheritance, a
kind of imperishable being. He had evidently the impression that
Christ made some pretence to an intimate relation with the unseen
state, and he wished to know the conditions of this enviable heritage.
Christ does not answer this state of mind in His reply. He has
no revelation about any inheritance above, as a state of merit for
some good thing done, or fact believed, by man below. He does

* All the elaborate disquisitions upon this subject in our older theology, and
in more recent times, would probably never have been penned had the conception
of revelation as a discovery of mysteries and a groundwork for spiritual astro-
logy not been firmly established in the theological mind.

SPIRITUAL TRUTH AND RELIGIOUS MYSTERIES. 197

not indeed go beyond the revelation already known to the man.
Christ says on another occasion in answer to a similar question put
by a scribe, Thou art a lawyer, and knowest what is written;
" how readest thoa ? " Love God with all yonr powers of heart
and mind and soul, and your neighbour as yourself, the man replies.
Do this, Christ says, " and thou shalt live." It is a life that He
reveals and communicates, and not immortality.

It is a mode of living that the gospel is concerned with, and it
reveals this mode of living in God through Him who was the
manifestation of God, and shews us how it may become ours.
Christianity inculcates as little anxiety about a future spiritual life
as about a future bodily one. Its principle and its practice, as seen
in Him who is the great revealer, are alike in both cases : Take no
thought for the morrow ; " sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof."
As Goethe says, " Was aber ist deine Pfiicht ? Die Forderung des
Tages." Life in the present is the strong feature of the Bible
teaching. There is no encouragement in Christ's life for the
sentimentalism which is so strong in our modern religious life, and
bo well reflected in much of our hymnology — a kind of childish
crying after what is, we fear, notwithstanding our boasted spirituality
in religion, a very sensuous heavenly inheritance.* Surely the
teaching of Christ, as well as the evidence of the working of His
Spirit in us, goes to show that he only who has done his work
deserves to be permitted to lay down his life. The best preparation
for death is a preparation for godly living. He is readiest to die
to-morrow who is living most fitly to-day. Since men have looked
upon the Bible as containing their " title to mansions in the skies,"
and not the elements of a life in God on earth, there has been a
great deal of conventional preparation for these mansions, as if the
life there would be essentially different from the life here. But, if
unending progress in life be not mere words, if spiritual perfection
be not a phrase, if likeness to God, and assimilation to His character
be not a barren sentiment — and these are what the Bible is concerned
with, — can that being realise this highest happiness which we, with
Christ's example and teaching and promise before us, can picture
for him, who has been a comparative stranger to the life from which
all these spring P Are spiritual perfection and spiritual development

* Christianity is at bottom a religion of entire unselfishness ; but, through
conceptions snch as those mentioned above, it has assumed in many the crassest
and most intense selfishness.

198 REASON AND REVELATION.

such trifling matters, that seed-time and summer and harvest may
be past, yet these ripest spiritual fruits appear without the gradual
unfolding which the slow progress of the ages brings ? Is heaven a
dream, or sort of gay pleasure-ground, into the right of which one
may fall quite as accidentally as one does sometimes into an earthly
heritage, that we should think any spirit, however earthborn, equally
ready with a child of God's for the felicities and influences of that
supreme condition of a spiritual life ? For it would seem that a
condition of existence, rather than a locality to be occupied, is the
healthier mode of conceiving the future. And if any one on earth
has found no pleasure in the walks of holiness, in the paths of public
and private virtue, in intercourse with the Spirit from whom its
better life proceeds, will hurried concern or change of sphere open
his vision to the spiritual realities, and quicken his perception and
delight in these Divine perfections ? We make too violent a break
between the present and the future life by our unscriptural mode
of regarding both. We are ever taught to begin the life on earth,
which begun, will, no doubt, without any anxiety on our part, pass
into the life beyond, where the same power that communicated it
will carry on in us throughout eternity, tbe work which it began in
us in time. It is this life in us, and not a mere eternity of being,
that is made known in revelation and given to us in Christ.

The only sense in which Christ can be said to have brought
"immortality to light," was by shewing us how we may have eternal
life in sharing His life, which is God's Spirit of love. The light
He sheds upon this is simply the life He gives us. No one sees
farther into Hades than before ; it is still Hades. It is still a mys-
tery that the apostle shews. There is no rift in the blue sky to
disclose the plains of heaven to the Christian saint, nor cleft in the
hillside to show the flames of hell to the Christian sinner. There
has been no little display of selfishness exhibited in Christian
character, and there can be little doubt that it has its origin in the
belief that the Bible contains directions to heavenly bliss—a state
of mind quite similar in kind to that found in the ruder tribes I
have mentioned, who also have their guide-posts to these supernal
regions. We have heard the expression, " Prepare to meet thy
God," often handled by the Christian preacher; but it is almost
invariably interpreted as a call to make ready for death, that heaven
may be won and hell escaped. We have need truly to prepare to
meet our God, for every day we all meet Him, and with such sorry
preparation. Christian deathbeds, as a rule, have lost much of

SPIRITUAL TWITE AND RELIGIOUS MYSTERIES. 109

the grandeur and calm and sweet assurance of the ancient pagans
or the modern philosophers, because many Christians are so eager
to know what is beyond, and to have an assurance of their personal
safety. This f everishness about the to-morrow of our spirits would
be much allayed if the conception of revelation was more truly taken
hold of and vitally accepted. We should never, possibly, be able to
regard a change so thorough with equal composure at all times, but
it is also true that by no reaching to immortality can we have it ; by
living as Christ has enabled us to do through His revelation, we can
never lose it.

Some would have it that Christianity is a synthesis of certain
very puzzling antinomies; others that our knowledge in spiritual
matters is acquired by sensible perception raised up to con-
tradictory formulae of true or false. But antinomies are no more
essential in revelation than elsewhere, nor can we see that it helps
us in any way out of these difficulties. As we said of the mysteries,
the Bible may give rise to antinomies of its own, and include some
which existed independently of it. Free will and necessity may be
given as an example of the latter kind, the Church doctrine of the
Trinity as a sample of the former. Many of these antinomies, it
should be observed, are the result of a philosophical mode of stating
spiritual truth rather than the substance of revelation itself. Like
so many of the mysteries, they are the fruits of speculation, either
by theological writers in the Bible, or out of it. Christ, and this is
worth pondering, does not address the speculative intellect. He
directs Himself to the religious element in man, and the profoundest
truths in Scripture revelation — its highest principles, are no anti-
nomies to him who knoweth by doing. I do not except the state-
ment, " I and My Father are one," which might have less the look
of an antinomy if taken along with remarks such as the following .
" I in them, and Thou in Me, that they may be made perfect in
one." " That . . . He might gather together in one all things
in Christ, both which are in heaven and which are on earth ; even
in Him." " The Son also Himself shall be subject unto Him, . . .
that God may be all in all." " He that keepeth His commandments
dwelleth in Him, and He in him." Take these and other so-called
antinomies, and to mere metaphysics and psychology they are worse
than antinomies, — they are absolute confusion ; but they are not so
to the religious consciousness. They are spirit and life. It was
from the action of philosophy that the theory of predestination origi-
nated, and it was under it that it was developed ; it was from the

200 REASON AND REVELATION.

same source that the Pelagian theory sprang and shaped itself.
Scripture is not responsible for the antinomy, neither does it supply
the philosophical solution. Life, here, as elsewhere, is the only
solution; "My Father worketh hitherto and I work," taken with
the injunction, " work out your salvation with fear and trembling :
for it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of His
good pleasure," is neither a contradictory nor an antinomy, but a
statement of fact. Contradictory equals is and is not, and this where
both the terms in the contradiction are known to us. Contradic-
tories are of two terms, of which each, in our experience, excludes
the other in our understanding ; they are probably the result of a
very general law in mental life, viz., inseparable association. Why
are is and is not contradictory P Simply we take it, because our
constant and invariable experience has made them so. Where, then,
is the contradictory in free will and necessity, e.g., both of which
seem stated with equal precision in the Bible, according to philo-
sophical reading P In the first place, it is not, " I am free and not
free." Necessity cannot be brought into any such antagonism with
free will. But, apart from this, free will and necessity, as they
are termed, do not exclude each other in our experience, and cannot,
therefore, contradict each other. The fact is, we find the states of
mind which these words are intended to describe, always combined
in our experience, and through this constant combination, by the
operation of the law before mentioned, indissolubly connected as a
condition of mind prior to action. What are they then ? They are
two synchronous states of mind invariably recurring together as
antecedents to some other state.

But what of the other so-called antinomy regarding the supreme
idea in Scripture, formulated in theology as the Trinity : there are
three persons and one God P There can be very little doubt that
theology has here, as in many other cases, too rashly applied her
logic. We ought, of course, to take the explanation which accom-
panies such a statement ; and from this explanation we are aware
that no contradictory is intended in the ancient creed in the sense
of one term excluding the other. When it is said, God is three
and one, it does not mean, God is one and not one. But when
men bring such truths under the category of the understanding,
we may expect that they will be looked at by some in tlie light
of facts based upon sensation and intellection, which are the ground-
work of the logical understanding. It has been thought that what
are designated antinomies have one part which always looks to

SPIRITUAL TRUTH AND RELIGIOUS MYSTERIES. 201

God, and another that looks to man. The same may be said of
every truth, however, for all things have a Godward look. The
misfortune about antinomies is, that they do not always have such
a luminous object as God to which they turn. What we have
seen to be the revealed knowledge of God has no relation to an-
tinomies, either in itself considered, or in its mode of perception,
which we shall have occasion to shew is not through the logical
understanding — the sphere of the contradictory and of antinomies.
A more correct view of what is revealed, will place these antino-
mies in their proper place. When we learn to know that He is
spiritually discerned, they may be dissolved, or at least shown to
be harmonised in religious experience by a spiritual intuition. Not
that any miracle of knowledge is worked in the spiritual sphere any
more than in the natural, but that these antinomies are not more
concerned with the one than the other. Are there no antinomies in
spiritual truth then P Yes and no. Yes, to the logical understand-
ing ; no, to the religious apprehension, which is the faculty immedi-
ately addressed in revelation. Many of these apparently dualistic
truths may spring from the development of Scripture revelation
when subjected to reflection (just as they have done in ordinary
experiences) presenting to our minds the appearance of two parallel
lines that never seem to meet, extend them as far as we may. We
feel, however, that these point to a higher union, but it does not
come within the scope of revelation, as such, to effect this conse-
quence. When we shall see Him, and know as we are known,
these mysteries of intelligence may find their known expression,
and that will be God.

Bunsen speaks of a metaphysical element in Hebrew religious
consciousness, but the phrase is not free from inexactness. There
were many elements in their religious conceptions, as is apparent
in their literature, and with them as with others, it may be true
what Bunsen says, that the highest subject of thought was the Bearch
after the solution of the deepest mysteries, the relation of the Divine
with the human. If by " metaphysical element " and " deepest
mysteries," however, be meant the abstractions of philosophers and
schoolmen, there never could be a greater misrepresentation of the
Hebrew mind. The entire development of the national thought, as
shewn in its literature and its full manifestation in Christ, is opposed
to all that can be called mystical or even metaphysical. Their cry
was after something more vital. David was a true Israelite, and
made a true Israelitish speech when he said, " As the hart panteth

202 REASON AND REVELATION.

after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after Thee, God."
That I might see Thee, was the longing of a spiritual nature after
the spring of its life. When God asked them to seek His face, it
was no absolute infinite entity that was thought of when the poet
replied, " Thy face, Lord, will I seek." It was still the knowledge
of God and His fatherly love and will that they were striving after.
This was what God was teaching them until they came to know
that He pitied them " as a father pitieth his children." But there
certainly existed deepest mysteries for them, which, although no
subject of revelation, proved a powerful attraction for a contempla-
tive religious Hebrew mind. The writer of the Book of Job felt this
burden of the mystery, so did the "preacher." Even to the verge
of scepticism the psalm- writers breathe forth suppressed wails over
human life and death, or burst out into indignant questioning.
Prophets as well as apostles, in many cases, had to be content with
thinking that what they knew not now they would know hereafter.
Great outstanding problems were seen by these men, but their
solutions were not forthcoming. Evil is a terrible mystery with
which they coped in vain, and its origin and nature are no clearer
to us than to the Jew.* On either side of revelation, as well as
within it, there is plainly mystery. Genesis has a look into the
infinite past, but all it says is " God." The Revelation of St. John
has a look into the interminable future, and all it says is " God."
Between the Book of Genesis and the Apocalypse we are told what
God is ; but how He is, we know as little as if no revelation had
come to us. This knowledge of God, which is life, together with
our experience, must work out the rest. Spiritual life, and the means
to this life, are what the Bible contains.

In the resuscitation of the old belief by Moses we have sub-
stantially the sum of Christ's revelation to man : a God of love
seeking the love of man, that His life may be in them, and His will
be done by them. He was even then a God shewing mercy unto
thousands of them that love Him and keep His commandments.
It is in this that we can see the unbroken unity that pervades the
Bible. Its many parts do not certainly with equal precision reveal
God, but they all tend in some degree to deepen in us the knowledge
" which passeth knowledge." It is the same Spirit from first to
last, and the same revelation that it brings home to our souls. To

* Their earliest traditions, as we see in the story about Eye and the serpent,
turned upon this great question.

THE CONTENTS OF THE BIBLE. 203

know God, that we may fear Him, is what the prophets labour and
pray for. The darkest times among the Jews are those in which
there is no knowledge of God in the land ; the millennium of pro-
phecy is when all men shall know the Lord. By knowledge cometh
reverence of Him, or godly fear, which is the germ of perfect love.
Those that know Him shall love Him : we love Him because He
first loved us. Those that fear Him shall know Him : " the secret of
the Lord is with them that fear Him." It was this and no mystical
or metaphysical ens that Job saw when he said, " Now mine eye
seeth Thee." It was such a vision that the psalmist prayed for,
" to see thy power and thy glory as I have seen Thee ;" a vision
followed by the necessary consequences of self abasement or a desire
to be perfect as God is perfect. This is the only kind of knowledge*
of God that can give any intelligible meaning to the profound words
of John : " Beloved, now are we the sons of God ; and it doth not
yet appear what we shall be : but we know that when it doth appear,
we shall be like Him ;" and why like Him P " for," he continues, " we
shall see Him as He is."

How intimately Christianity is connected with what was best and
vital in Judaism may be seen in the attitude of Christ towards the
older revelation. It is, as I already had occasion to notice, no abso-
lutely new revelation that He brings, but a clearer manifestation of
the old in the first place. His purpose was not destruction but fulfil-
ment, or, as we now say, development. When the scribe of whom I
have already spoken came to Jesus with a question, Christ did not
give him an answer that was in any way strange. He refers him to
Moses, whose commandment could never become obsolete, although
it might well become plainer and fuller as seen in Him who is the
light of the world. He is thus a fulfilment of the hope, " In Thy
light shall we see light" Perhaps the best hint we have of what
Christ considered His true position in religious development to have
been, is to be found in the concluding chapter of Luke's gospel,
where He traces the stream of spiritual life through Moses and the
prophets down to Himself : " He expounded unto them in all the
Scriptures the things concerning Himself." An exposition, I imagine,
including many more passages, and most likely involving other
trains of thought, than those usually given in Bible references and
forming the staple of testimony too commonly received as the sole
witness to Christ in the Old Testament scriptures, in the face of His
general statement, " they are they which testify of Me."

A great deal of what I cannot but think is mere sentiment, is

-■J

204 REASON AND REVELATION.

often written about the connection of Greece, and paganism generally,
with Christianity. One can surely hold to the evidence of a strict
development of spiritual truth through Judaism without, as some
suppose, laying oneself open to the charge of indifference and apathy
to pagan thought. It is no question of admiration of the one or the
other, but simply a question of fact. Pagan thought may be, in the
estimation of some, richer and nobler than either Judaistic or pri-
mitive Christian thought, or, in the opinion of others, the reverse
may be true ; but neither position has any bearing upon our present
question. Mr. B. H. Hutton may be taken, in our country, as a fair
modern exponent of the connection between Christianity and pagan-
ism. In an essay published along with some others by Mr. Marti-
neau, he lays down the position that Jewish history brings out the
personality of God, other history the Divine capacities of man ; and
that, therefore, co-operation of different natures was needed for the
fulfilment of revelation. The old revelation gives us the presence of
a pure will among the Jews, which Greece could not accept because
it saw a Divine in the human and yearned for an ideal. Christ ful-
filled both the pure moral will and the ideal perfection. With refer-
ence to this, I must say that, I do not know about the personality
of God being brought out in Jewish history, but certainly the
Divine capacities of man are written on it with fully more plain-
ness than on any other history. In His image was man made. " I
have said, Te are gods, and all of you are children of the most
High." God is reported as saying to Pharaoh, " Israel is My son."
And were not the Jews in some way a peculiar people, a holy
nation, living with God in paternal and filial relationship, and in a
measure exhibiting the truth that Christ came to set forth more
clearly, that God loved men so much as to call them His children ?
The declaration in the New Testament is a true development of
Jewish spiritual life and thought, that "as many as received"
Christ, " to them gave He power to become the sons of God." The
desire for God and the knowledge of Him, so evident in Hebrew
literature, show how deep was the feeling of capacity for the
spiritual in a people, whose earliest story tells how their ancestors
attempted to become as " gods, knowing good and evil." The more
sweeping statement of this relation to paganism is that which I give
in the words of Henry More, but the substance of which forms still
the subject of Hulsean and other lectureships : " Christianity is not
only the complement and perfection of Judaism, but also of uni-
versal paganism ; the sum or substance of whatever was considerable

w'

THE CONTENTS OF THE BIBLE. 205

in any religion being comprehended in Christ's gospel." The ex-
amples given by such thinkers of this summing up of paganism by
Christianity are the following, — Christ's birth, crucifixion, resurrec-
tion, apotheosis, overthrowing of Satan, and judgment attended by
reward of the good, and punishment of the bad.

But, not only are the fundamental ideas (and it is with these
we have to do in discussing Christianity as a separate phenomenon)
in Christian revelation independent of pagan influences, and separ-
able from the common ground here alluded to by More, the whole
attitude of thought in the one is unlike that in the other. There
are paganisms in the Bible, just as there are in it metaphysics,
mysteries, physics, ethics, ethnologies, myths, and many other things ;
but the paganism is not in the spiritual revelation, which is the
special content of the Bible, but rather in, what I may call, the
general culture of the various periods in which the Bible was
composed, and which is a natural concomitant of an historical
revelation. As a record, however, of a true and genuine spiritual
revelation, it is a light shining in a dark place.

CHAPTER XIII.

THE ORQANON OF SPIRITUAL TBDTH.

" If we lire truly, we shall see truly."

The Bible being a record in human language and with national
colourings, radiating from a past era in history, we must necessarily
get at whatever it may contain of truth, spiritual or otherwise,
primarily through the forms of language. At the very outset, it is
proper to notice that this collection of books is to be approached
like other books, in whatever other way we may have to show that
it can alone be truly apprehended. The Bible as it stands is no
miraculous magical collection of vocables or sentences, which work a
charm in some mysterious manner. We shall afterwards see that
it is related on its human side to many sciences. It presupposes
grammatical and historical knowledge, and demands philology and
general scholarship of a very high order, for its full historical com-
prehension, and for a correct view of its varied contents. There is
no science or branch of inquiry, perhaps, at least none that bear
npon moral, mental, or social questions, but might be applied to it
with advantage, either in interpreting its teaching or in criticising
its multiform records. It is all the more necessary to call attention
to this, lest, in the treatment of the method of what has been seen
to be the special revelation in Scripture, there should be thought to
be a latent sympathy on our part with those who ignorantly imagine,
that Scripture is its own light. We have no desire to cry up a new
light, or

" A lib'ral art that costs no pains
Of study, industry, or brains."

There has been some confusion, both with those who have asserted
this too generally, and those who have laughed at the

" dark-lanthorn of the Spirit,
Which none see by but those that bear it."

We have previously noticed the tendency to make mistakes in
reasonings from analogy ; nevertheless, an approximate comparison
may at least be made on this subject between natural light, and
the so-called spiritual light. It is necessary to remember, however,

THE ORG ANON OP SPIRITUAL TRUTH. 207

that it is no more than an approximation. The rays of the sun
may be said, vulgarly, to be visible by their own light ; but when
we say so, we are not supposed to have exhausted all that may
be known regarding them. We only state that this outward pheno-
menon harmonises naturally with our physical constitution ; that,
independent of all scientific theories, light affects us so and so. But
no one who cared for his reputation as a man of sense, would
maintain that simply by basking in the sun, and enjoying its vivi-
fying and pleasant influences, he could discover all the properties of
light. We may be nourished by its beneficent beams, and yet be
ignorant of the curvature of its rays as they pass through the atmo-
sphere, and which determines for us the places of distant objects.
Even so may a spiritual life be sustained by the Sun of Righteous-
ness in those who have been irradiated by His beams. Many may
well be gladdened by His cheering light, to whom historical inquiry
and philological research are as strange as are the widospreading
investigations on the properties of natural light, its mode of propa-
gation, the origin of its colour, and its rate of velocity, — questions,
some of which are dependent on recondite mathematical truths
and celestial observations, which in their turn affect so many other
branches of physical science, as to entitle them, in the estimation of
some, to a principal place in the connection of the physical sciences.
It is not improbable that there is a spiritual sense, or a kind of
spiritual instinct of life, which assimilates to itself whatever is fitted
tot sustain it. And, thus, it may very readily come to pass in re-
ligion as in nature, that many may perceive and embrace a spiritual
truth, into whose origin and growth they could neither philosophi-
cally, nor otherwise investigate. Discernment of these things is not
always proportioned to subtlety of intellect or power of speculative
and abstract thought, but more frequently to healthiness of that
kind of life which the sphere of truth infolds, whether that be
natural, moral, or spiritual. But when I say so, I insist, on the
other hand, on the scientific side of physical facts. And so with
the Bible. While, perhaps, claiming no special science in itself, and
while, as we may afterwards see, not permitting of a scientific
statement of its special truths in the usual sense in which theology
takes it, there are likewise in the Bible matters to which many
separate sciences can be applied, and a complete and thorough
knowledge of which cannot be attained in any other way than
through a series of related sciences. What is, for example, human-
istic, or simply historical, mythological, moral, or quasi-scientific

208 REASON AND REVELATION.

in the Scripture record is matter of undoubted science, and can
only be understood by scientific methods.

To some extent, then, the record of revelation is dependent on
scientific processes for its full elucidation. It does not affect the
question at all that these branches of inquiry are Jewish, and mixed
up with other and spiritual truths. It is all the more necessary that
there should be a winnowing and thoroughly good sifting of the one
from the other. In order to see the necessity for scientific method
in this connection, one has only to think of the linguistic difficulties
that have had to be encountered, and that remain to be mastered,
before the manifestation of the Divine, which lies bedded in the an-
cient tongues, can dawn upon the minds and hearts of all. And this
is only an elementary difficulty. The operations of nature are not
at first and without labour perceived by us. The methods of any
natural process require repeated observation and experiment before
they will unveil themselves. The records of the past in the uni-
versal history of the race, and in the history of our globe, as well
as in the history of revelation, are dependent on other inquiries in
some measure for their explanation. Whether the special contents
of revelation are in themselves related to other forms of truth re-
mains to be considered ; but that we are indebted to other sciences
for admission into these contents as they are presented to us, seems
beyond question. These sciences, we shall see, will help us to the
solution of what is no unimportant problem in religious, as well as
common life, viz., to know that in the Bible in which our spiritual
life consists, by enabling us to distinguish it from that in which it
does not consist.

But this is merely introductory. The contents of Scripture in
their most distinctive features profess to be the record of a mani-
festation of spiritual relations, and to know these the sciences can-
not help us. They only "make ruptures through the outward
wall of God's temple, and break into holy ground ;" but those who
thus break through the wall may learn no more there than they
have done in the physical universe. The spiritual may be about
them, as we doubt not it always is ; but it is only spiritually dis-
cerned, not intellectually apprehended. We know that it is very
usual to regard Scripture revelation as intellectual products of a
spiritual sphere, and to be approached by this side of our nature.
This is precisely the view that had to be considered in looking at
the kosmical revelation. The objections that are good against the
search for the spiritual in nature through intellectual processes are

THE ORGANON OF SPIRITUAL TRUTH. 209

equally good against the search for the same kind of facts by a like
process in the Bible, or indeed anywhere. It is the order of truth,
and not its locality, if we may say so, that determines the method
of its discernment. In the case under consideration, we shall try
in rain to apprehend by one faculty that which is only perceptible
by another ; or we shall probably, in as vain a manner, seek for a
class of phenomena in a sphere distinct from that in which they
belong, or which, if found in a foreign sphere, require to be detected
and separated. The first attempt very much resembles a man trying
to discriminate oolour by hearing ; the second is very like a man
seeking facts of consciousness, not in his mental experiences or
those of others, but in the order of what is outward and objective.

We have already seen that there are facts and relations appealing
to what is called, for want of a better name, the spiritual life of man.
Some call this capacity in man a spiritual sensation, and although
there is no need to quarrel about names when the things signified are
the same, there are associations and consequent positions bound up
with the term sensation, that cannot well be got rid of, and which,
in spite of ourselves, tend to obscure our notion of spiritual percep-
tion, by confusing it with sensible perception. The relations of God
to man unveiled to us in the Bible are of the nature above described.
These spiritual relations, like the relations between us and our fellow
men, for example, are real. That we apprehend one sphere of being
by a sense experience, and perceive its relations by corresponding
faculties, is no reason why another sphere of being dealing with
another set of relations should appeal to the same experience, and be
subject to the action of the same faculties. Nor is it only that the
distinctive contents of Scripture revelation are represented in such
a manner and in such relations as only to be apprehensible in the
way now mentioned, but the method itself is thus given in Scripture
as the only one by which a partial knowledge of its contents is
gained by man here, and by the perfecting of which hereafter a
knowledge proportionately perfect will be acquired. If we are to
consult the Bible for the purpose of understanding the special cha-
racter of its contents, we should likewise consult it in order to know
the true and proper method of perceiving these contents. And this
is stated by many men in both Scriptures. Psalm oxix., from verses
97 to 104, gives us in several expressions a kind of organon of
Divine knowledge : " Thou through Thy commandments hast made
me wiser than mine enemies : for they are ever with me." " I
understand more than the ancients, because I keep Thy precepts."

p

210 REASON AND REVELATION.

" Through Thy precepts I get understanding, therefore I hate every
false way." The secret of all this knowledge and understanding
lies in the exclamation at the beginning of this versified form of
Divine dialectic. " Oh how love I thy law ! " It is the same
method that is taught in Deuteronomy (iv. 6) : " Keep therefore and
do them [God's statutes], for this is your wisdom and your under-
standing." It is this also which is given in the noblest of many
noble passages in the book of Job : " where shall wisdom be found ?
and where is the place of understanding P " " The fear of the Lord,
that is wisdom ; and to depart from evil is understanding." The
collector of Hebrew wisdom does not forget this fundamental con-
dition of the highest form of it : " the fear of the Lord is the
beginning of knowledge," a fear which we have seen is the begin-
ning of the love that ultimately casts it out. And these are but
various forms of the same method that Christ proclaimed : he that
hungereth shall be filled ; " not every one that saith unto Me, Lord,
Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven, but he that doeth the
will of My Father which is in heaven." And the kingdom of heaven,
in Christ's meaning of it, implies all that can be included in a
knowledge of God and participation in His life.* The most memo-
rable, as being perhaps the most exact statement of this method, is
given in the gospel according to John, who was also, as will be seen
from the letter that bears his name, the best exponent of the method.
The statement to which I refer is in these words, " If any man will
do His will, he shall know of the doctrine." To this formula may be
reduced all the sayings on the subject that have been quoted from
the Old Testament, as well as the utterances of the apostles who
touched upon the " fundamental principles of the Divine science."
We are too much in the habit of regarding truth, in itself considered)
as an abstraction, forgetting that the abstract is in reality only a
form in which we hold the various presentations of a sense-given
experience. t The Bible contents, however, so far from being neces-
sarily apprehended in this way, are pre-eminently something of a
quickening force, and only apprehensible by a life corresponding to
the teaching given. It is the revelation of a mode of spiritual exis-
tence, and the communication of a life-principle, with which the

* Entering into the kingdom, fundamentally at least, is sharing in the spiritual
character and life of Christ.

f It must have struck many that the habit of philosophical abstraction, use-
ful and necessary as it is, hinders us sometimes as effectually from the full per-
ception of truth as it aids us at other times in its comprehension.

THE ORGANON OF SPIRITUAL TRUTH. 211

contents of Scripture are ultimately concerned. What Kant, there-
fore, says of ethics is true of revelation, that it starts with a principle
of acting, and is not, as he maintains, distinguished from ethics in
starting with a principle of believing. Having primary reference
to the nature of God, it is not determinable " by categories of exis-
tence, bnt only by predicates of our activities." This is the real
meaning of the new birth, which is preliminary to seeing the king-
dom of heaven and growth in the new life, upon which a deeper in-
sight into the nature of this kingdom depends. " Ye will not come to
Me, that ye might have life " is the key to all Christ's proclamations.
This is the explanation of His mode of setting forth His message
to men : Follow Me ; enter in at the strait gate ; come unto Me ; if
any man thirst let him come unto Me and drink ; I am the bread of
life; I am the . . . life. His whole aim was directed to awaken
men's spirits by direct appeals to the spiritual instincts that slumbered
in them and through presentations of the doings of God, by the ac-
tive appropriation of which the character of God should become
gradually known to men. There is a greater significance than we
often think of in the Old Testament description of the man with
whom God dwells : the man of a humble and contrite spirit, and who
tremble th at His word. The avenue of Divine knowledge is thus
apart and distinct from the medium of all sensible knowledge what-
soever. In being a spiritual life-principle, it is not to be confounded
with a series of regulative truths any more than with an order of
speculative truth, nor does intuitional truth or intuitive perception
properly describe the knowledge or the method of its perception.

It has been described by some as a regulative knowledge. Regu-
lative knowledge, if I rightly understand the kind of knowledge
intended by the phrase, is a knowledge the practical value alone of
which we can ascertain, but the truth or falsehood of which is not
a subject of inquiry for us. It is something given us, the nature
of which we need never expect to know by intellectual processes, and
something, therefore, it is concluded, that cannot be known by us in
any other way. It is a knowledge, accordingly, that we must simply
accept as a guide for our conduct through life, and hence its name.
This regulative knowledge may thus be purely arbitrary in its
nature. It is, at least so far as we are concerned, a set of discon-
nected rules to be received without question. It contains nothing
which we may aspire to know truly. The answer to those who
indulge in such aspirations usually is that finite goodness may not
be the same as infinite goodness ; but in whatever way the latter

p 2

212 REASON AND REVELATION.

may differ from the former, and whatever may be the spiritual reg-
ulations enforced by the latter, our duty is to acquiesce in the
directory furnished to us. Regulative knowledge appears simply
to be a conventional proclamation of directions that may, or may not,
have a basis in fact and reason. They are, as described, by their
nature non-progressive; at all events they are not inherently or
organically progressive. The only way in whioh they admit of ad-
vance must be by a kind of external mechanical addition. Our
knowledge, likewise, of these practical rules, if we can call that a
knowledge which in reality can be nothing more than an act of
memory, will not possess the common feature of all knowledge, that
of growth. As such truths were at the first they remain to the last,
unless a supplement be made to them from without. As Mr. Man-
sel says in his Bampton Lecture, " no one faculty of mind conveys
direct knowledge of the absolute; a revelation from God cannot con-
tain anything unwise or unrighteous, but we cannot estimate these
exactly." How we can pronounce such a judgment, when the ability
of forming one is denied us is not explained by the lecturer.

Speculative knowledge of Divine things, and knowledge of a
Divine life are different, not so much from the non-progressive
nature of so-called speculative knowledge of the Divine in itself,
as from the fact that here speculative knowledge transcends ex-
perience, while the method of knowing by doing, keeps within the
bounds in which alone any knowledge is possible, viz., personal
consciousness. It is sometimes said, that the highest term of re-
velation was always known, but that the connotation is gradually
unfolded. There is some confusion, however, in the use of such
phraseology. We ourselves certainly grow in this Divine know-
ledge, and the history of revelation shows a similar progression up
to the highest point, yet attained, in Christ, otherwise the method
would be a poor one, if not actually false. It has not been, how-
ever, by rules of logic, nor by intellectual notation, that this pro-
gress has been made ; since in what is purely spiritual we know no
more now intellectually of the metaphysical essence of its subject-
matter than at the beginning. The connotative meanings of spirit-
ual ideas, if they are to be called such, have not become known
by excogitation, but by faith. The spiritual relations into which
God has entered with man are the only characters of His nature
that we know of, and the only ones that we need care to know.
They are relations that concern our spiritual activity, not our specu-
lative faculties. We perceive them at first by a function of spiritual

THE ORGANON OP SPIRITUAL TEUTH. 213

life, and their farther knowledge is the result of an assimilated like-
ness in ns to that which is known. Speculative knowledge in theo-
logy is in the main, deductions from certain postulates of the in-
tellect, and is a knowledge about God. The knowledge which the
method here spoken of gives, is a knowledge of His life, acquired
through a spirit in which this life dwells. A knowledge of the
Divine life as manifest in His relations to men can never be known *
otherwise than as these relations are experienced in onrselves. Only
so far as the God-life is in us do we know God. Up to the measure
of His fulness in us may we know Him, but no further. Thus, for
example, it is said, God is love ; but it is not necessary to get specu-
latively at the essence of love, and through that at the essence of
God. We must ourselves experience the nature of this Divine love
if we are to know His love. He who was in the bosom of the Father
is said alone to have known Him ; and as we approximate to this
mode of life which Christ has made possible for us, so will the same
thing be said of us. If we are to call questions in spiritual truth
by the name of problems, we can only say that their solution to be
a solution through practice, and not through logic.

The fixity of these ideas in the mere understanding, gives us no
hope of a better comprehension of them by speculative means.
But, by the method of assimilation through similarity of life, or by
the predicates of activity, there is a continuous search with an ad-
vancing knowledge, until the end contemplated is realised — full
vision and perfected life being synchronous. This is the face to
face knowledge, of which Paul speaks, after the darkened medium
is gone. The source of that knowledge of the profound truths of
the spiritual life and the Divine character by John was in the ful-
ness of the new Spirit in himself. When John speaks of God being
love, he has attained to a true and intimate acquaintance of this
Spirit in God, by the method which he himself has given us. John
did not, as some theologians would have us believe, — Brown, e.g., in
his " Divine Analogy," and followed in more recent times, and by
better philosophers, — consider the knowledge of spiritual things as
consisting in a conception of them by resemblance and representa-
tion only, and not in the least minute perception of the things
themselves or any part of them. As Brown states it, " The Divine
reality and true nature of the mysteries appear as little to us now
after the revelation as they did before ; it is only remote similitude
or resemblance which appears to us." Again, he says we do not
receive the true nature of the doctrines : " such a revelation could

.214 REASON AND REVELATION.

not be unless we have faculties to receive such." He sums up his
method (and we take him as fairly representative of this type of
thought) by illustrating revelation in the case of a blind man to
whom a knowledge of colour is conveyed through another sense,
say feeling. Yet the man is not to think that he sees with his eyes
so as to have a partial view of colour. The ideas are distinct, and
only bear resemblance or analogy. " He hath therefore nothing to
do but to submit to his informers in full conviction of his total
want of sight."*

There seems a certain satisfaction to some minds in acquiescing
spiritually in this hopeless blindness, but it is not quite so easy for
others to rest content without the least glimpse of light, espec-
ially when told by informers, and when conscious in themselves
that they have seen the light. In the face of Christ's declaration :
" he that followeth Me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have
the light of life," we do not see how any one can counsel another,
because he is in the midst of thick darkness, to adhere to the most
apt symbols of things which are utterly imperceptible. We do not
now ask, How, if the things are so utterly imperceptible, apt symbols
of them could have originated, or how we can have any certainty
that they are apt P If we are at the mercy of our informers, what
better authority have our informers than we have ? Had they the
eyesight, which we have not, to see the light, and from cognate
senses to construct apt symbols for us who are spiritually blind?
And if they had the sense, or whatever else we may agree to call
it, what hinders that we should have it too P That may be let pass,
but such a position as the one now under review, rests upon the
erroneous supposition that revelation is given us as a powerful
conviction of our spiritual incapacity — that it is a communication
that certain things are, but that we cannot realise them. Surely
a strange rendering of revelation! If it is an unveiling of some-
thing, it is a quite unnecessary, or at least a most imperfect act, unless
there be faculties to which this is unveiled.

What interest, so far as we are concerned, would it excite in us
although heaven and earth were one constant birth of visual love-
liness, if our sense of sight were unaffected, and all these delicate
intimations reached us through our touch, and our aptest symbols

* Mr. Manscl's position in the Bampton Lectures rests more upon Brown's
4 Divine Analogy " and that mode of thought than has anywhere been no-
ticed

THE OROANON OF SPIRITUAL TRUTH. 215

for them, authoritatively conveyed, were smoothness or roughness
or some other tactual experience ? If knowledge at one entrance
be quite shut out, it will not come in, in any kind of fulness, by
another door. If revealed truth be not truly revealed to us, we
could very well dispense with such a revelation. If we are working
merely with some arbitrary symbols, and not with the deepest and
most vital spiritual realities, we may as well discard this second-
hand instruction and conventional arrangement, and live in accord-
ance with the sensible facts of an external world, and the men and
women in it. In the latter case, we can enjoy a healthy, and if we
will, progressive physical, intellectual, and moral life, by conforming
ourselves to our conditions; in the former there can be no life,
since there are no certain vital conditions, but only an intellectual
symbolism, to which our conceptions alone, and not our spiritual
nature may conform. The root error of a system of thought that
lands us among abstractions, and gives us shows for realities, lies in
the speculative method which it applies to Divine truth ; and this
method arises from a mistaken idea of the nature of that truth as
metaphysical, and not moral or spiritual. As it is put, we cannot
know the inherent attributes of Gk>d, because totally different in kind
from ours, inasmuch as His essence or substance is pure spirit. It
is not, however, of such an " unknown God " that the Bible speaks,
but of One whose attributes are made known and knowable by us,
in the degree in which we share them through His communicated
life. " Hereby we do know that we know Him if we keep His com-
mandments." There is no doubt about it but what may be put at
rest. John Smith might well say of such attempts to hide God,
that " we might well spare our labour when we so industriously
endeavour to find something in God that might produce the effect of
some other passion in us." If we postulate a certain kind of know-
ledge as revealed, we must be consistent with the method of ac-
quiring it ; but we must see that our postulate is according to fact,
to which all postulates must ultimately conform. The saying of
Christ, that if the Jews continued in His word they should know
the truth, taken with the declaration that He is the way, the truth,
and the life — that no man cometh unto the Father but by Him, con-
tains the knowledge of Divine things, and the true method of this
knowledge. It is the manifestation of God to the Christ-like in soul.
Conformity to God's will through the implanting of the Spirit of life
in Christ will bring the soul into intimate communion with God, and
prepare it for the manifestation of Himself which Ho gives unto

216 REASON AND REVELATION.

those who are " of the Father : " " he that hath My commandments
and keepeth them, he it is that loveth Me ; and he that loveth Me
shall he loved of My Father, and I will love him, and will manifest
Myself unto him." The knowledge of God which is alone possible
and real for us, is the unfolding of His nature to our renewed will.
We cannot make one step in the Divine knowledge without this ;
the very elements, " the sincere milk of the word," can in no degree
be alimentary to the soul that does not desire it as a new-born babe.
Sanctity of the soul is the condition of the primary knowledge of
God's character and will, as increasing sanctity in heart and life, is
the condition of all advancement in it. This is the function through
whose perfected action complete correspondence between it and its
object will be effected : " we all, with open face beholding as in a
glass the glory of the Lord, are changed unto the same image from
glory to glory."

It is not surprising that men of pure philosophic temperament
should have approached the knowledge of God in the Bible through
the common medium of knowledge, and attempted to construct a
speculative and transcendental knowledge of His nature and at-
tributes ; it is surprising, however, that theologians, who also
declare themselves to be Christians, should have done the same
thing. Their theological philosophy is a constant contradiction of
true spiritual experience. It is no incomprehensible essence which
makes itself known to the Christ-like as it does not unto the world,
but a living and loving Father, with attributes of character appre-
ciable and appreciated by the renovated heart, notwithstanding the
consciousness it has of the perfection of these attributes and of
its own imperfection. There is a very profound sense in which
it is true, as has been beautifully said, that " Jesus astonishes and
overpowers sensual people. They cannot unite Him to history, or
reconcile Him to themselves. As they come to revere their in-
tuitions and aspire to live holily, their own piety explains every fact
and word." As in the observation of nature a faculty by exercise
gets to know where to look and what to look for, so is it in some
measure with the method of knowing through a renewed spiritual
will. It is not, however, a great spiritual inductive method of know-
ledge with advancing empirical generalisations ; it is rather a sym-
pathetic knowledge, deepening with the life relations that unite us
to the subject of it. And this of all kinds of knowledge is that
which has the most genuine insight. We know the laws of many
orders of being, but we know nothing of their real habitudes of

THE ORGANON OF BPIEITUAL TRUTH. 217

life. We know how this thing and the other thing is — the given
sum of antecedents that make np the consequent. By a method
of Divine knowledge we do not know this, bnt we know the life in
ns to be the life that is in God. We know God, by partaking of
the Divine nature that comes to ns through Christ. The means
by which we gain this is by being made conformable unto His death
— so knowing Him, and the power of His resurrection. And thus
it is that our life becomes like His, a doing the will of the Father,
which is the only way of access to Him. Painters, it is said, have
in some kind of way to become the things they draw, if they mean
to draw them well ; and to know another man, we all feel that
something more than mere intelligent observation from without is
necessary. We see daily how much ignorance of each other exists
for want of a bond of love and sympathy between men ; and most
of ns are, it is to be hoped, familiar with the revelations that come
to us from one with whom we deeply sympathise, — revelations that
are visible only to the human heart. With all the passages to the
heart opened by love and sympathy, one man will have glimpses of
another in an hour which an unsympathetic on-looker, however
intelligent an observer he may be, could not get in a lifetime. It is
in the absence of this that our eyes are so often holden when spiritual
realities are near us, and not from any inherent incapacity in us to
perceive them, or necessary impossibility in them of becoming known
to us. With spiritual capacities corresponding to spiritual verities,
there is no more difficulty conceivable in apprehending a spiritual
Being, and spiritual relations, than in apprehending physical, or
mental relations. In the metaphysical sense of being, both are
beyond our apprehension. The riddles supposed to exist in our
apprehension of God are simply logical puzzles, and have no exis-
tence in fact. To say that we cannot know God, because to know
an infinite Object requires an infinite time in which to know Him,
is nothing to the point, when we understand properly that the know-
ledge is of moral or spiritual qualities, which are not commensurate
with mathematical quantities. And, besides, when we consider the
method of apprehension, any supposed difficulty of this kind disap-
pears. While the baffled intellect, after sheer mental effort, may
ask, who can by searching find out God ? the faithful, religious soul
can say from experience, the pure in heart shall see Him.

There is no view of God that shows so distinctly as this method
of His perception does, the wide difference between the God of the
New Testament, and the God of primitive belief, of scientific thought,

218 REASON AND REVELATION.

or metaphysical speculation. He is no more like the Taaroa of
Polynesia, or the guardian deity of the Finns, than He resembles the
Final Cause of theologico-scientific thinking or the Absolute Infinite
of metaphysics.* The argument from design is as good as the *
arguments from eternal truths and necessary existences to an eternal
necessary existing Mind, but none of them demonstrate Ood. It is
very doubtful, as was before shown, whether design, as commonly
understood, is the proper expression for the world-plan, and many
would object to the metaphysics that rests upon intelligible na-
tures, species, or ideas, which are the subjects of immutable science.
Such processes bring us no nearer the object of our search. There
are few, I am persuaded, who can really feel much force in another
argument which is sometimes used in this connection, and expressed
in something like the following form : " That which transcends our
capacity to comprehend must therefore be above our ability to in-
vent." If this were accepted as an argument, it would prove too
much, and might bring in with it a whole brood of metaphysics —
imaginative beings, many of whom are evident inventions, although
for a long while they resisted any explanation.

There has been a singular fatality even in the case of Christian
men in their search after God in nature and in abstract thought.
If at any time they can hear God's voice there or discern His shape,
let them cherish the vision and the sound for ever ; but let them
see to it that is the voice and form of God and not the echo and
phantasm of man. The highest manifestation which we have of
God's nature is that of love, the sum of all moral and spiritual per-
fections. This love, as it includes the desire for the best interests
of the objects of its love, has holiness as its primary element. If
the manifestation be thus essentially spiritual, it can only address
itself to what is spiritual in us. We may see in Christ what was
the method of His intercourse with the Father. It was through that
which Ho came to give to us — a pure and holy will. The first

* These deities ore very like each other in nature as well as origin. Taaroa,
the uncreate Creator, is no unique personage in barbarous tribes, and Christians
may profitably compare the Finnish notion of creation and Creator, with some of
our notions on the same subject, drawn from external observation of the world,
and supplemented by speculation and otherwise. We have, of course, general-
ised our notion more than these rude peoples could do theirs, and instead of
having a guardian deity or genius for every object or every species, we have a
kind of guardian for the whole round of nature : like their deities, independent
of it, yet in it, not affected by its decay, yet affecting and controlling it in every
part.

THE OBOANON OP SPIEITUAL TRUTH. 219

step to personal knowledge of God manifested to us is the partaking
of the life which we have in the Son. All other knowledge, although
it may boast itself a knowledge of God, is but a subjective know-
ledge intellectually created by us. As we see in Christ on many
occasions how clear a head comes from a large, well-loving, acting
heart, how far above all knowing of a thing is living it, so we
may be certain it is only in like manner that the same intimate
and certain knowledge of the Father can be attained by us. If the
heart be at the mercy of some sinful pleasure, it will be dark to all
these higher things ; but if it be at the beck of what is pure and
holy and Christ-like, we may have the image of the heavenly re-
flected there continually, and with greater clearness the more we are
not hearers of the word only but doers of it. This world lies as
open to what is spiritual in us as the world with which we are so
familiar lies open to its appropriate faculties. As many are blind to
all but a fraction of the latter, so are many equally blind to much of
the former, which is only to be gained by the inner workings of a
spiritual life. The highest and deepest religious experience pro-
duced either by revealed truth or otherwise comes not so much
from mere mental effort as through a spiritual life, which has shown
its attachment to Christ by keeping His commandments, and in
which the Spirit of truth as a consequence dwells. Without a life
of purity in the Spirit, without being free in some measure from
pollution, without having our supreme delight in God, and in this
way having our affections purified through the perfect purity of
their object, and all the spiritual impulses of the new life excited,
holy desires and appetences awakened in us, we never can possess
any true knowledge of God as He is revealed in His word. One
may know all that metaphysics can teach about a God, or that
intellect working on nature, or through the contents of the Bible
even, can extract from these sources, and still be very far from the
real vision of one's spiritual life. One may travel through the ages
of the past in search of proof of God's providential dealing with the
race, or scan futurity for probable hopes of His action in the coming
times, or listen to the un traversed sea of thought that metaphysicians
tell us is ever sounding round the utmost verge of knowledge, and yet
miss the real knowledge of God, if the heart be impure. Speculatively
one may imagine one knows God, as one may speculate without data
in other things; but one can never know Him until one has become in
some degree assimilated to this object of knowledge, and so come to
it with a sympathetic life.

220 SEASON AND REVELATION.

The method that places a life elevated and sanctified through
Christ's love as the only means of knowing God is no vain rhapsody
of religions superstition, nor is it prompted by any wish to elevate
what is mystically called the inner light, at the expense of reason,
but is based upon fact and the representations of Scripture, as well
as upon the experiences of Christ and His followers, both ancient and
modern. Nor in thus representing the spiritual contents of Scrip-
ture, as spiritually discerned, are we moved by any desire to narrow
culture, rather are we influenced by a desire to widen it. We do not
see any reason why culture should be confined chiefly or exclusively
to what is intellectual in man, and the relations perceived thereby,
nor why this or any other individual element of our nature should
appropriate the name. There must surely be some training and dis-
cipline of our spiritual nature, the well-spring of our best actions.
No one can wish that intellectual improvement should eclipse what
we may call spiritual education. Culture, as it is generally, and
with too much limitation understood, is a great boon to man, a
sweet solace, often a refining power; but we need not therefore think
the limited conception of it to be the end of beings who are spiritual
as well as mental. A more intimate knowledge of the external
world, scientifically and aesthetically, is the result of the culture
generally included in that name ; the vision of the spiritual — the god-
like — God Himself, is the fruit of the one we speak of. This last
kind of culture is the gateway to a knowledge of the highest life we
have any conception of, by allying our own spiritual life with all
that is distinctive of it, that is, by having an element instilled into
the vital forces of our spirits that will gradually purge our hearts
from all impurity, and make them the home of holiness, and the
abode of God ; " if a man love Me . . . "We will come unto him,
and make Our abode with him."

One test of the truth of this method lies in the fact that those
who are conscious of this knowledge are likewise conscious that it is
always dependent on the state of their spiritual life, and feel with
Paul that the fulness of it is only possible in the future. While the
battle wages between sin and holiness, while stains of sin soil our pure
affections, the vision must be proportionately dim, the reflection must
be in that degree marred. The glass through which we look now
may ever and anon be darkly clouded by the unsightly breath of im-
pure desires and sinful emotions. But even now, if we, by the con-
stant habit of our life, cherish God's presence in our soul, and control
the movements of our inner life, we shall see clearer and clearer, and

THE ORGANON OF SPIRITUAL TRUTH. 221

at last behold the unspeakable glory face to face. And this, as it is
the supreme joy of a spiritual life, and its sum of knowing, is also
the consummation of its perfection. The clouds that hide the vision
now are not- the conditions of consciousness, nor the limitations of
logical thought, but the clouds of impurity. The only barriers that
hinder our progress to our destined goal of union with God, and
knowledge of Him in that union, are not the barriers of inherent in-
comprehensibility, but the barriers of a sinful and rebellious will,
which like mountains stand between us and our highest good. This
method of knowledge through internal similitude of life may be
thought by some to be open to the objection usually urged against
spiritual knowledge through feeling, viz., that it renders religion
subjective in character, uncertain in its doctrine, and individual in its
constitution ; since, it is argued, feeling is only individual, and conveys
no information beyond itself and its mode of affection. But, this
method of knowledge is different from knowledge by feeling, and
which is usually described as intuitional consciousness. It is not a
knowledge through any one sense, but through the concurrent action
of the spiritual life, and is no more individual than that life itself is ;
and this by its nature is of the widest generality, being God's life in
Christ. This method does not, as we saw, admit of the least uncer-
tainty in its doctrines, it provides a sure test whereby we may know
that we know God, viz., by the fact that we keep His command-
ments ; its objectivity is unquestionable, inasmuch as both the life
and the knowledge have their source external to ourselves.

CHAPTER XIV.

THE BIBLE AND THEOLOGY.

" Divine truth is better understood as it unfolds itself in the purity of men's
hearts and lives than in all those subtle niceties in which curious wits may lay
it forth."

It has not been possible to tabulate the organon of spiritual truth as
one can an ordinary scientific organon. There has been brought
into one view, however, the various expressions of it given by the
different writers in the Old and New Testaments, to whom a
spiritual experience was familiar ; and these have been found to
agree in their method of Divine knowledge, as both a new and
living way ; new with respect to other methods, which have been
tried, and living with respect to itself. The apostolic writers are more
frequent in their statements regarding this Divine philosophy than
regarding many, other matters. They tell us that without holiness
no man shall see God, that love alone can apprehend Him whom
we call infinite love. Their exhortations are in harmony with tho
statement that the new man is renewed in knowledge: "bo ye trans-
formed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is
that good and acceptable and perfect will of God." That which
was the method of those whose experiences compose the Bible, and
of Him who is the sum of its teaching, must in principle be our
method. Any radical alteration cannot be attended with fruitful
results. The history of thought is a luminous illustration of the
futility of erroneous methods. For investigation of any kind the
wise teacher would say, First, method ; and second, method ; and
again, method. There will never be any permanent advancement in
Divine knowledge until its method be clearly seen, and fully acted
upon. It need hardly be said that this is the first step towards any
satisfactory agreement among Christian thinkers. They may, as they
have hitherto done, split upon subordinate questions in theology
without any chance of union, so long as no true point of departure
is fixed, from which every question alike must be taken up. That
this point has not yet been decided upon with any unanimity is
perfectly plain to all who will take the trouble to look at the present
and past state of religious thought. It is always said that differ-

THE BIBLE AND THEOLOGY. 223

ehces may be expected so long as men do not remain mere brutes ;
various minds breed various opinions. Such a pessimist view of
thought is most unworthy, and we think utterly false. It is not an
opinion that would gain a moment's hearing in any respectable
scientific society, neither would it be reiterated with the approval
which it constantly receives in religious society, if the subject-matter
with which the one deals were treated in the same exact method in
which the subjects that engage the attention of the other are
handled. The variety, such as it is, does not proceed from the
various minds, but from the method or methods in which they work.
Individual idiosyncracy in mental life is wide apart from essential
contradiction in thought. Nature is full of idiosyncrasies, if wo
may say so, but there is a vital unity everywhere, although the
like forces may be embodied in the most various fashions. The
differences in thought on which we almost congratulate each other,
are not unity of life in wealth of form ; that could excite nothing
but pleasure in a thoughtful mind. They are much more radical,
being in reality the proverbial brood of error. Truth is one, error
is many ; the results of an erroneous method or methods are, there-
fore, necessarily numerous. The result of a true method can only
be one, is the invariable teaching of well-ordered thought and the
warning of ill-ordered investigation.

The method which we iiave set forth in the preceding chapter is,
whether true or false, opposed to one in very high repute, which re-
gards the contents of Scripture as so closely related on their formal
side to the facts of science as to be susceptible of scientific treat-
ment. An opinion of so long standing and so universally acted upon
cannot, however, escape inquiry. This involves a view of Scripture
as compared with theology, and really raises the question, is there
a science of theology as it is generally pursued ? To get any ap-
proximate answer to this question we must see what science and
theology are. By theology we do not understand at present what
has been called natural theology, but that theology which takes the
Bible as its source. Before we can determine anything about theo-
logy, we must have some definite conception of the nature of this
source, as it appears to the theologian. He would agree in saying
that it was Divine, as distinct from natural. His theology is then
that theology drawn from the Bible, which is Divine. But what,
we must ask, is theology conversant with in the view of these who
cultivate it ? In other words, what is the subject-matter which dis-
tinguishes it as a branch of inquiry ? what is its \6yos ? Etymo-

224 REASON AND REVELATION.

logically of course it would be God ; but we need not keep strictly
to the mere nomenclature. Theology if not in name, at least in
intention and plan, is meant to embrace the contents of the Bible.
Its claim to a distinct existence as a reasoned body of truth, rests on
the supposition that its source and subject-matter are different from
those of other forms of truth. One peculiarity of the subject-matter,
as held by theologians, is that a knowledge of it is naturally unat-
tainable by man. It is Divinely originated, and so originated, because
otherwise it is beyond our reach. In short, the truths with which
theology professedly deals are supersensible truths. Now, let us
see what science means. Science in its more general and popular
acceptation may signify knowledge ; but knowledge does not truly
characterise it. There are many kinds and degrees of knowledge
which we should scarcely designate by the term science. From ear-
liest times the great majority of men have lived and died as they
are now doing, ignorant of science unless by name, but with less
or more knowledge. We may say, with some, that knowledge is a
lower form of science, and in ultimate analysis it will very probably
be found that knowledge is science in progression. But even on
this view there is a distinction sufficiently pronounced to warrant
us in marking off the one from the other. Science is the full ex-
planation to reason of any given sensible phenomena that have come
under observation ; knowledge is a partial and empirical explanation
of such. From sensible experience of any given set of phenomena,
science, through observation and after well-known processes of logic
produces an explanation of the phenomena — gives the rationale of
them, the science of them, so that we do not now know merely that
they are, but also how they are, and can predict with the utmost
certainty that, the same conjunction of circumstances occurring, the
same results will follow. Science, then, appears to be the explanation
of known sensible phenomena, or the formalised expression of the
relation between these phenomena.

If we apply this to theological truth as already explained, there
does not seem to exist such a congruity between science and theo-
logy as would warrant us in describing the latter as a science. The
two things seem very distinct. Science is concerned with sensible
experiences ; theology, according to those who cultivate it, with super-
sensible. Science is of things known, while theology, if it is a
science, is, according to most, the science of the unknown j using
known and unknown with reference to the same faculties. The
truths of theology, from their nature, are said to be beyond sensible

THE BIBLE AND THEOLOGY. 225

experience, and must, therefore, be beyond a form of holding truth
which is, and only can be, based upon that experience. How can yon
rationally, taking this in its scientific sense, explain anything that
according to onr supposition does not come within the domain of
reason.

But, besides, a very good and quite relevant proof of what has just
been said is to be found in the fact that no such science as theology,
so far as we are aware, exists. Any one who objects to a conclusion
from such a negative position must at least show how the thing is
possible ; and until this is done, and from what we have before us,
one cannot be far wrong in inferring that it is not possible. What
are the facts regarding this pseudo-science ? Is it not notorious
that on every doctrine in theological dogmatics, which is the form
this science has assumed, so far from finding explanations, as we ex-
pect to find in ordinary sciences, we find a haze very much more
impenetrable after the scientific effort than before? Is it not con-
fessed by almost every candid and unprejudiced mind, that after
wearied discussions carried on over all Christendom — after endless
arguments, the conclusion, corollary, and second corollary are un-
known and unknowable ? Are we not told, if we innocently hazard
a doubt on some supposed explanation, that it is a mystery, and must
be taken upon authority P Do not dogmatics merely concentrate
difficulties, with much ingenuity, into one compact mass P Do they
not appear to be laboured efforts made by men to show, not the
power of reason in explaining phenomena, which is the exhibition
of science, but its irremediable powerlessness P Science, as we have
said, aids us in making the unknown and the unfamiliar known and
familiar to us. Theology, if it does not really do the reverse (of
which we are personally convinced), certainly makes hard sayings
much harder. Theology has been defined, and will, we think, by
most of its supporters be considered well defined, as an arrangement
in due order and dependence of truths in religion, of which we have
knowledge, so as to show their relation as elements of one organic
whole. The first thing to be observed here is that this would be no
science at all, but a compilation and digest of the scattered state-
ments in the Old and New Testaments on some special subject. And
this objection does not merely apply to the definition given above,
but to the actual state of theology. It is no more a science on this
showing than is a digest of law cases or an historical textbook.
Classification even in physics is distinguished from science properly
so-called, . since it proceeds upon technical skill gained through

Q

226 REASON AND REVELATION.

science, and is not an exercise of scientific thought. But there is some
delusion in the description of theology just given. In no collection
of the statements with which it deals is there order and dependence,
at least rationally conscious order and logical dependence. How
can we know that one thing depends upon another when both are
unknown in their relation to each other P How can we know that
things are elements of one organic whole when the elements are
each incognisable, and the whole beyond the conception of the
faculties that deal with them P In answer to this, it will be said
that the definition speaks exclusively of truths known; and if
theology dealt with these there would be nothing more to say. Bat
it is not proved, nor does it appear possible to prove, that we have a
knowledge of the truths with which theology deals by the faculties
related to our logical understanding. The knowledge spoken of in
the definition is simply, as shown by the result, a verbal knowledge,
which, however necessary to us, is not all that is intended to be con-
veyed. Theology never tries to pierce beyond the phrases, nor to
effect more than a union of their meaning. It is largely concerned
with getting the mean of a number of grammatical terms, which is
really no scientific exercise of thought. We might almost as well
designate a compend and commentary on Plato a science of Pla-
tology, as designate current systematic theology a science. If one
takes the ordinary mode in which any important doctrine is induced,
as it is termed, from Scripture, one feels naturally astonished at the
idea of science being attached to the worked out theological process.
We find a fair example of this method in a very recent contribution
to this science by the late Dr. Crawford, of Edinburgh, in his work
on the atonement. Among other methods he rejects the historical
for what he calls humble induction ; and it is a very humble kind of
induction according to Bacon's view of induction. This method con-
sists generally in collecting passages in the two great divisions of the
Bible bearing on the doctrines to be determined, as, e.g., Moses says
this, Job confirms it, and we find it so many times in John and Paul,

therefore . Many who follow this plan, we do not say all, do

not even give it the appearance of induction, since they proceed on
the assumption that the authors from whom they quote were me-
chanical instruments in the hands of one Divine penman. An induc-
tion from this point of view is simply a farce, at least it is a labour
quite unnecessary and gratuitous. For on the supposition that the
Bible is inspired in this sense, one statement on a doctrinal point is as
good as a hundred and one; the additional hundred can have no other

THE BIBLE AND THEOLOGY. 227

force than simple reiteration. It can only amount in the end to
this : because it is written, be it often or seldom, therefore it is. This,
it need not be said, is quite unlike what it imitates — scientific
verification. Science pursues its investigation through a series of
observations, repeatedly tested, and in various forms when it is
possible to vary the experiments, lest there should be any mistake in
the observations. In theology each statement is an authoritative
and final one, and needs no verification. In dogmatic theology, too,
in spite of the opinion which shall be noticed, we know at the end
only what we knew at the beginning, if as much. A conclusion
from induction, on the other hand, as we saw, opens to us an ex-
planation of something that we did not know.

This practice in theology of proceeding on an implied, although
not avowed, conception of the Bible, as above stated, not unfre-
quently violates all notion of historical development in Scripture,
by assigning a value to statements in any book at any period in
the Old Testament equivalent to apparently similar statements in
any book in the New ; and in so far as theology has led to this, it
is chargeable with being an obstruction to any scientific considera-
tion of the Scripture record. In reality, it will be found that a
dogmatic and scientific view of religion are found to be inconsistent
with each other. Much violence has been done by this system of
thought to the Bible as a whole. I do not merely allude to the
doctrinal bias with which we all approach our Bibles, but to that
inconsiderate abstraction of words and clauses from their true con-
nection which dogmatic theology sometimes encourages. The theo-
logical method is largely dependent on words and phrases; but
a writer's meaning is not to be gained except from an enlarged
view of his writings. Instead of this, by concordance or reference
of some kind, our systematic theologian comes plump upon a clause,
subordinate, it may be, to the main thought of an elaborate dis-
course, an ejaculation in a dramatic poem, or an aspiration in an
ode, and from these incongruous elements some fundamental truth
in spiritual metaphysics is built up. Nothing would have more
astonished the mind of the writer of the book of Job than to have
found that he had contributed by some of his dialogues to the
most recondite abstractions in the Christian belief of the 1 9th
century, or the writers of the psalms, that they had been breathing
forth from their devout souls the Church's creeds.

There has been very plainly a false analogy at the bottom of
systematic theology. It has been concluded, without any reference

Q 2

228 REASON AND REVELATION.

to the truths in the Bible and the means of their perception, that
the process of explaining them is exactly the same as the process
that holds in sensible perception. Because induction unclasps one
book, therefore it is thought it will unclasp the other also. Bacon
had an objection to Divinity, but it is one that will tell equally
well against science in general : the farther, he thought, you go
from particulars it is the more dangerous. It is not, however, in
advancing beyond the particulars so much as in advancing without
them, which, as he says somewhere, cannot be without supplies by
supposition and presumption. If these supplies were out off from
theology, we are afraid it would make a poor show as a reasoned
body of truth; the body at least would become much emaciated,
and finally, it is to be hoped, disappear into space.

Theology in the hands of some has a much higher aim than the
one I have just noticed. Many supporters of dogma as a science
are at one with the views already stated in considering much of
what is called dogmatic teaching anything but scientific. With
them the generalised meaning of passages is very shallow work ;
and they contend, that beyond this there is a process of digestion
by the Christian reason whereby the scattered statements of Scrip-
ture are formulated into the abstract articles of the creed. Dogma
is thus the result of the fusion of the concrete truth of Scripture in
the mould of reason. It is not enough to translate the general
hints of the Bible into one compact statement, but these hints must
be worked up into the consciousness of Christians, and being there
elaborated, it comes forth in a truly rational form, and is then
equivalent to a scientific statement in being " the rational concep-
tion of the facts." The result of all this, in the language of Baring
Gould, is, that what is drawn out of the primary dogmas " follows
as rigidly as do all the results arrived at by astronomers from the
doctrine of gravitation." This, at any rate, has more the look of a
science than the mode which we formerly considered. It affects
the language and processes of science, and has stages of develop-
ment like it. It starts with a time when all the truths " were there,
but in suspension ; to be precipitated into dogmatic formula?, but at
a later date ; " when " the faith of the early Christians was confined
to certain facts on which certain hopes were built up." A time
which, one may parenthetically remark, is much needed again.
But this condition was, it appears, not enough for men of intellect
and culture, who must needs begin that developmental process of
doctrine from the accepted facts of the ruder and earlier Christians,

THE BIBLE AND THEOLOGY. 229

which has attained proportions so large that it threatens, in the
estimation of some, not only to supersede, but to tarn ont some-
thing entirely different from the facts from which it is supposed to
have taken its rise. Through all snch representations, both of the
method and history of the so-called science of theology, there is, as
cannot bnt be observed, great pains taken to keep close to the terms
of science, bnt the likeness does not often extend beyond the termi-
nology. Reason, it is held, has only comprehended any set of
phenomena when it can explain the mode of its occurrence; in
other words, infer its laws. The laws are the forms in which we
write some ensemble of facts, and by the application of these laws
to new experiences we are enabled to explain some new concurrence
of phenomena. Or in another way, science, it may be said, reduces
many particulars to one general principle ; it seeks after the ante-
cedent of some given consequent.

But it cannot be said that what is called the rationalised concep-
tion of Biblical facts, as generally presented in systematic theology,
gives us anything like the law of these facts, in the sense of its being
the full or at least approximately exact explanation of them. There
are many dogmas with which it is not attempted to do this ; and
those dealt with after this manner are by no means so universally ac-
knowledged as a law of nature is accepted after proper tests. Nor
has it been scientifically shown that any one truth in the Bible on
which the dogmatic spirit usually works has a connection like that
of antecedent and consequent. Where this has been tried the con-
nection has been made through data arbitrarily assumed, and beyond
experience to confirm or refute. The process, while fruitful in creat-
ing an imposing intellectual system, has been no less fruitful in errors,
sometimes in absurdities and direct contradictions. The theological
system that history has handed down to us, in whatever way it may
be interesting, and it is so in various ways, is not interesting because
it has advanced beyond isolated facts to the scientific unity of them.*
The Christian consciousness, and the purified Christian reason that
rationalises and develops doctrines, have evidently a want of uni-
versality and an excess of arbitrariness that one does not find in the
natural consciousness and the unsanctified reason. It is perfectly
well known to the lay mind, notwithstanding the technical phrase-

* The subject of Church creeds does not come within the scope of the present
inquiry. No one, I imagine, regards these creeds as scientific statements ; they
axe simply the legal articles of Christian communities.

230 SEASON AND REVELATION.

ology of theologians, that it was not the Christian reason of the third
and fourth centuries or any century that stamped its image on Scrip-
tural elements and so produced dogma, but only a certain section
of that reason. It was often a question of numbers and not of
reason. Herein also we see a very marked difference between tho
mode of development in science and theological dogma. The one,
as I have said, was carried and is still supported and carried, as we
witness in the most consistently dogmatic Church, the Roman Ca-
tholic, by numbers ; the other is carried against numbers, and by its
inherent reasonableness clearly demonstrated and capable of verifi-
cation by every properly educated man. No one could imagine for a
moment any branch of science being developed by a scientific associ-
ation who voted one, explanation as against another ; but every one
knows that theological science has been entirely indebted to this
artificial contrivance. It seems hardly necessary to say that the
boasted grandeur and illimitability of the science and its hopeless
stagnation are inconsistent. If its subject matter has such a range
and deals with questions which on all hands are acknowledged to be
the most difficult and profound, how is it that any sign of advance or
even of inquiry is met by the keenest theologians with such deter-
mined opposition ? We should expect from the supposed nature of
the science that there would be a constant pressing forward into new
regions of this vast territory — that investigation would at least be
encouraged, and not frowned down or stamped out, by the boasted
extent of its subject-matter. If it is a science, one is forced to say
that theologians as a rule have ill learned the principles of science
and have not caught at all the true scientific spirit. There is an
ever increasing activity and freshness in scientific thought, and all
classes of scientific thinkers unite in exciting a quest into every
branch of knowledge, and behold, with acclamation, blows given to
old errors by the discovery and announcement of new truths. There
is precisely the reverse in systematic theology, and those who assume
the guardianship of this finished science combine in an attempt to
prevent any quest, and receive with alarm and menace blows given to
old beliefs by the announcement of new conceptions.* An inde-
pendent and original investigator in dogmatics is looked upon as an

* I have no wish to burden the book with any particular theological position
in dogmatics ; and besides, it would take me too much out of my way, and be
unsatisfactory to boot, to attempt in parenthesis to show which is truth and which
error in theology. What I advocate is healthiness of life and fearless thinking.

THE BIBLE AND THEOLOGY. 231

unusual phenomenon where he is not regarded as dangerous. What
is thus normal in every other science is quite abnormal in theology.
The conclusions of a science fenced with penalties, kept intact from
age to age by serious sanctions swiftly executed on the boldest think-
ers, would be considered an unwarrantable procedure anywhere else
than in theology. It is quite possible to say, as it will most likely
be said, that all this applies to the theologian and not to theology.
It is somewhat strange, however, that it is only in theology of all the
sciences that such a position is taken up. Transplant the theo-
logian into any field of science, and his attitude to thought and
thinkers will be as another man's.

It is very generally held that we have the germs of a theology in
the New Testament. The various formulae that we meet with are
assumed as such ; for example, those of baptism into the name of the
Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, and the statement
of Paul in Romans x. 9: "if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the
Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised
Him from the dead, thou shalt be saved," — considered to be an
acknowledgment of Christ's Divine sonship, and several others.
A clear case for Christian doctrines is supposed to be made out
from Hebrews vi. 1 : " Leaving the principles of the doctrine of
Christ, let us go on unto perfection ; not laying again the foundation
of repentance from dead works," etc. But these, and the general
expression met with in Romans and in Timothy, "form of
doctrine," "form of sound words," have little connection with
dogma as we understand it. These so-called doctrines and forms
of sound words are rarely if ever rationalised expressions of re-
vealed facts, but precept and instruction for the promotion of
personal religious life, and are thus part of the facts and not the
laws of the facts. A glance at the context will prove this. The
forms and formulae are not spoken of with regard to a certain mode
of holding the knowledge of Divine truth, but with respect to the
Divine life which they contain : " ye have obeyed from the heart
that form of doctrine." And the elements of the doctrine of Christ
that we are to learn, according to the writer of the epistle to the
Hebrews, are not the beginnings of a rationalised conception of Divine
revelation, but the elementary germs of the new life itself. Doctrine
in the New Testament will not bear the technical meaning thus sought
to be attached to it by the modern theologian. Paul's doctrine, like
that of his Master, is in general not an induction or deduction
according to scientific form, but a doctrine according to godliness

232 REASON AND REVELATION.

(1 Tim. vi. 3). These statements can thus form no nucleus for the
formation of dogma, which is rational and theoretic in its aim,
while the other is spiritual and practical.

It is said with more truth, however, that there is what the
Germans call lehre in the Bible, somewhat resembling the less am-
bitions dogmatic theology in being an ordered arrangement of a re-
velation formerly given, with explanations more or less clear, but
not pretending to amount to a rationale of the contents. That which
is so often spoken of as the Thora is given as an example of this
ancient lehre. There are, at all events, various attempts to state
in some comprehensive expression the contents of the Bible; but the
position from which this is done is very different from the dogmatic
position. Such comprehension does not affect to be a law of Divine
facts, or an absolute, or even a proximate solution of these facts. It
will be found that, like revelation itself, from which the expressions
of this lehre are drawn, they keep strictly to the form and spirit of
its contents. The summaries, of which mention is here made, do
not come within the compass of dogmatics, even in regard to the
truths generalised. There is a most significant absence of all ques-
tions that are purely abstract in their nature, and which concern
the mode of certain spiritual existences out of experience, such as the
doctrine of the Trinity, the general dogmatic statement of the atone-
ment, etc. They are essays rather to gather up the scattered and
multiform spiritual contents so far as relating to spiritual life, and
to form them into some unity. There is a tendency in all our minds
to give off in one inclusive expression many particulars, especially if,
as in the Bible, we can discover amid the many details the link
which holds them together. The attraction to this lies in having
fragmentary thoughts or principles bodied in a finished statement.
There are very many ways in which this can be done, and various
minds will each choose its own form, and thereby enrich the com-
mon life. There is such a wealth and many-sidedness to thought,
and particularly to spiritual thought, because of the far reaching
nature of those principles with which it deals, that on its objective
as well as subjective side variety is to be expected. The kind of sum-
ming up of religious life-principles which we mean may be seen in
the conclusion of the Hebrew preacher : " fear God and keep His
commandments : for this is the whole dutv of man," " Thou shalt
love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul and
with all thy mind, and . . . thy neighbour .as thyself," is the
nutshell into which Christ, on the famous question of a lawyer, puts

THE BIBLE AND THEOLOGY. 233

all the law and the prophets. Paul holds the endless variety of
Christian principles in the sweet bonds of Christian charity — the
love which " is the fulfilling of the law." Peter envelops all in a
spotless robe : " be ye holy, for I am holy." James binds them in the
leash of law : " so speak ye and so do as they that shall be judged
by the law of liberty." John, following his Master, and with still
more succintness, concludes all in love to God, because, as he says,
this embraces the other head under which Christ reduced all the
law and the prophets, inasmuch as " he that loveth God loveth his
brother also." This, to a scientific theologian, is a very unambitious
exercise of induction. It does not concern itself with what makes
up the bulk of all our creeds, the ontologies! questions in religion.
For theology is in the main simply an ontology with spiritual colour-
ing, and may or may not concern our spiritual life.

The reference of many life-principles and facts to one or a few
leading seminal ideas is in keeping with the aim of the whole con-
tents of the Bible, and with the method of perception which has
been seen to be laid down there, and is, therefore, strictly within
religious experience, and productive of the grand purpose of revela-
tion, to advance men in spiritual perfection. Dogma, judiciously
considered, can, at its best, scarcely be reckoned as a help to the
highest development of Christian character in charity, meekness,
unselfishness, and the other qualities called the fruits of the Spirit.
No one can, on the other hand, think of science as anything else
than a means to the improvement and elevation of mankind mate-
rially, morally, and mentally. If dogmatic pursuits bear this test,
we will begin to think there may be value in them as well as an
undoubted scientific character. But is any one aware of a case in
which dogmatics have been operative for good upon the spiritual
life ? The study will, like any other logical exercise, cultivate a
certain sort of mental sharpness, but this is irrespective of the sub-
ject-matter with which it deals. There is one way in which it has
been operative, but not for spiritual good. How many has it hin-
dered from ever seeking this life ! What have been the causes of
disputes among theologians and Christians P Certainly neither the
life-principles of the Divine, nor the general expressions of these
which have been mentioned as peculiar to writers of the Bible, but
the supposed rationalised form of Divine facts. What has been the
source "of the prolonged dispute between legitimate science and re-
ligion but the positions, often irrational, and when not irrational
quite inexplicable, of the illegitimate science of theology ? Why

234 EEA80N AND REVELATION.

has charity been so long such a distinguishing mark of a well cul-
tivated man, and so conspicuous by its absence in Christian society,
unless from the fact that theology has no place for such a concrete
thing in its shadowy abstractions P Why have God's words disap-
peared, and the words of the schools been substituted for them, but
because of the fever of theology, which has seized mankind, so that
it is no longer sufficient for a man "to be a Christian, he must be
of Apollos or Cephas or Calvin" P What are our churches for P To
help men in the way of life, it will be answered ; but who knows how
often they have thrown the stumbling block of theology in the way
of some little ones P To save souls, one says ; but how often have
men been driven from their doom — lost, as is charitably supposed P
There is a rag of officialism in the English Church in consequence
of which burial is denied within its precincts to all unless they are
interred according to its formula. This looks a very extreme out-
come of dogma. Men, however, can, without serious difficulty, get
burial of their dead friends in spite of the English Church. We
cannot so easily bury our dead beliefs, mainly because of the various
churches, or rather, because of their dogmas. We should decently,
and with all becoming reverence, bury many of the mental forms of
onr ancestors as we inter their bodies. Let us have monuments
erected by all means ; they will help some people's memories, and
perhaps sustain their too fleeting sentiments. It is no more incum-
bent on us to carry about their mental furniture, if it is not ours also,
than it is to bear about their physical relics. Autumn sheds its
leaves, and winter shrouds them with such purity and sanctity as
men know nothing of, and the new spring comes forth again in its
own fresh robes, not in the cerements of the dead year. The ab-
surdity of preachers thundering at vices that do not exist has often
been noticed, but this is no worse than talking a theology that has
lost its meaning.

44 The stuff that's made
To furnish man with thought and feeling is purveyed
Substantially the same from age to age, with change
Of the outside only, for successive feasters."

But this " change of the outside" may make all the difference
between feasters being fed or not.

Much has been said of the losses on the ancient Vedic Hyirins and
earlier religious literature of the farther East ; but does not our
sacred literature exhibit something very like this, — theological con-

i
i

THE BIBLE AND THEOLOGY.

235

captions, patristic traditions, priestly ordinances, concealing as
effectually as glosses the simple majesty of what once was Christ-
ianity P Perhaps, who knows, strangers will hereafter come to the
seat of Christendom as they have gone to India, and exhume oar
earlier and purer faith. Let us anticipate them ; let us look at these
things with open face. As has been said, " the Law and Christianity
bear to be looked at with fresh eyes, nay, they demand this by each
new time." We are not to disregard the past, but we must criticise
it, and see that it belongs to us. In religion, above all, this is a per-
sonal duty ; since it is a matter of spiritual life, and not of mere
formalised belief; and anything that tends in the smallest degree to
hide spiritual reality from us instead of bringing that reality nearer
to us must be thrown aside, however venerable the veil may be. If
we presented Christianity instead of theology, to men, there would
not be so many standing aloof from it. We know no class that
would much object to this unless the professional theologian and his
admirers, who have a strange dislike to a simple Christianity that
is not associated with the technicalities of a system. Men are not
indifferent to Christianity so much as they are impatient of the airs
and arrogances of theology. They have refused the one, and unfor-
tunately with that have rejected the other, represented as it is in
such beggarly fashion, that men are hardly to be blamed if they
do not discern in the caricature the beauty and excellence of the
thing aped.

An historical and textual study of Scripture, with the view of
tracing the growth of the religious sentiment in the Jewish nation
and the general development of the life of the people, may accom-
plish much. Systematic theology in the sense of an orderly arrange-
ment of Biblical facts, when modestly gone about and properly
estimated, may have its value, but it can never aspire to be a science
in the sense of giving a rational explanation of Scripture contents.
The consciousness of the Church has been long maturing the doc-
trine of the atonement, but which is the correct law of this article
of dogma ? Shall we look to Origen, whose theory was that it was
a clever overreaching of the devil ; or to Anselm and some of the
Schoolmen, who held the theory of satisfaction or payment in full of
a debt ; or to the refined one of Duns Scotus of an acceptilated or
legal satisfaction ; or the Grotian theory of respect to governmental
law ; or to later theories, viz., the moral one of adequate confession
and repentance, or the apocalyptic one of a manifestation of God's
love and reconciliation ? Which of these is the boasted rationale of

236 REASON AND REVELATION.

the facts, and by what means are we to verify the law so as to gain
the certainty of an approximate solution of this transcendent truth P
If, as is said, this great truth, which is "the very foundation of our
hope and faith, transports us at once beyond the region of earthly
relations to that mysterious ocean of truth where the compass of
human experience can no longer guide us," * it is vain to speak of
any rationalised conception of it ; we may as well speak of a rational-
ised conception of the planet Jupiter, including that of its inhabi-
tants, from the data which visual observation aided by the telescope
furnishes to us. Who shall help the man involved in the meshes of
the doctrine of sin, as stated in Pelagianism or Augustinianism,
Arminianism or Calvinism ? Which is the rationale of the mots ?
And how will it be with the theories if the basis of them be found
to be a foreign myth incorporated into Jewish history ? Who can
tell with any exactness an inquirer who wishes to know what degree
of approximation the doctrine of God as elaborated by Christian
reason bears to the metaphysical entity itself ? The evident con-
clusion to a plain thinking man is, that, if not impossible, it is most
difficult to form any theory of the facts of revelation which have
been mentioned. They are not given in the form and order in which
general theories can be constructed about them, and it is something
like a delusion, natural enough perhaps from our practice with other
facts, to throw them into such a shape.

The main reason why theology, as the rationalised expression of
Bible truths, cannot form one of the sciences is that already men-
tioned, viz., the method of their apprehension arising from their
purpose and nature. In the Bible we have given us the means of
knowing God rather than any intellectually apprehensible truth
concerning Him. It does not contain a bundle of truths, which by
our piecing together of the various parts may give us an exact men-
tal conception of the spirit world, but a communication of a ger-
minating life-principle, which, growing up in us, and as it grows,
will enable us to know more fully this sphere of being. It is this
that theology has concealed, and by its wrong method has turned
men's minds away from the leading facts of revelation. By thus
applying a form of perception which belongs to another sphere of
experience it has unnecessarily complicated the religious problem.

It is not meant that theology in any sense is altogether inadmis-
sible, but in its usual sense it assumes a great deal too much in

* Macdonnell's "Donnellan Lecture."

THE BIBLE AND THEOLOGY. 237

affecting to be a scientific induction. It is not without good reason
that in science proper the name of God, e.g., cannot find a place. It
is not found necessary by scientific men as a working hypothesis.
Nor will it find a place as the sole subject-matter of a science, although
a special science be formed for it and its cognate questions. Science
is a translation of the outward multiplicity of relations into some
equivalent rational formulas ; the method with the religious contents
of the Bible, on the other hand, is the incorporation of a vital spirit-
ual element with our spiritual nature. In the former we impose our
mental life as it were, or the forms of our thought as they are called,
upon the endless variety of nature ; or rather, we gather up the con-
stant impressions on our senses into a rationalised order; in the
latter case we have to place ourselves in given conditions, in order
to evolve a more or less perfect spiritual life. As ideas simply, those
of science are distinct ; those with which theology deals are, as ideas,
indistinct. Through sensual experience, and the scientific intellect
exercised on the facts of that experience, we gain an insight into the
relations of things around us ; through Scripture revelation, and per-
ception by a renovated life, our souls are nourished. It is not easy in
the present state of the subject to illustrate the distinction between
science and religious knowledge by any kind of antithesis. One way
of doing so would be, perhaps, to compare our positions in the sen-
sible and the spiritual world. Spiritually, man may be regarded as
undergoing an evolution of that side of life, the necessary stimuli
to which lie mainly in the Scripture revelation. He is, as it were,
a unit of a spiritual kosmos now only in process of being formed, as
the teaching of the parable of the mustard seed would indicate. This
being the case, any rational accounting for the facts is, if not impos-
sible, immature, — our impression being confined to the experience of
influences tending to progressiveness in this life. We are, accord-
ingly, elements in this spiritual sphere undergoing certain trans-
formations dependent upon certain conditions, and incapable of ra-
tionalising processes which are as yet incomplete. That is an ex-
treme way of putting it perhaps. What is meant is this, that the
contents of Scripture are not primarily concerned with truths that
appeal to our understanding faculty, but rather with animating in-
fluences that are intended to operate upon our hearts and consciences,
and appeal to the spiritual element found in every man. The end
of the commandment is always life, being " charity out of a pure
heart and of a good conscience and of faith unfeigned." Regarded
from this standpoint there is a manifest unity in the Scripture con-

238 REASON AND REVELATION.

tents ; regarded from the theological position they are purely a
congeries of puzzles. A great authority has said that God is not the
author of confusion hut of peace ; and widening investigation con-
firms this to be the case everywhere. Theologians, however, contra-
dict their teacher on his own ground by making God indirectly the
author of confusion, " in all the churches of the saints " at least.
Controversy is occasional everywhere ; it is chronic in dogmatics.
Indeed, it is boasted by our historical theologians that it is by this
kind of antagonism that the science is built up; but it is not evidently
in this way that the great prayer of Christ is to be realised, "that
they may be one even as We are one," — evidently a thing much
nearer His heart and more pertinent to Bis life-work than the com-
pletion of theories that have no conscious basis in fact. It would be
amusing were it not somewhat lamentable to hear divines abuse
physicists for dogmatising, as they phrase it, after a tolerably patient
investigation of facts, on certain theories regarding the physical
world or the physical constitution of man, while they themselves
without the same preliminary verification of facts, and for the
most part on the authority of something like a Schoolman's dreams,
theorise dogmatically upon an eternal spiritual world. Not the
creation but the Creator is their subject, as if the nature of God
were reducible to the category of the reason — as if an intellectual
perception could be substituted for "the pure in heart." The
faculty of perception and the nature of the thing perceived exclude
the idea of science. It may seem out of date to speak of an open
vision, but it is not surely out of date to speak what is true; and the
open vision to the eye of faith is a much truer description of the
mode in which the spiritual contents of the Bible are appropriated
and known than the abstract conceptions of scientific theology.
Some hold that there is no progression in the method here laid down,
but we shall afterwards see that it admits of the greatest progress.
The greatest sum of all knowledge in this the highest field of know-
ledge will be a perfected vision of God. But the perfection of our
being, our likeness to Him, is the sole condition of this, and not the
power to scientifically explain metaphysical and supersensible phe-
nomena. And as we grow in this likeness we shall hunger more for
righteousness, and to that extent shall possess more insight into the
Divine; so that what we have attained will appear in this Divine per-
spective to be as nothing to that which is before us ; our stature as
it comes nearer Christ's will always, to a more susceptible spiritual
life, seem disproportioned ; our wills as they conform more to His

THE BIBLE AND THEOLOGY. 239

must by a keener sense feel the slightest discord inharmonious ; and
thus we shall be drawn above all earthly goals as oar souls expatiate
on widening spiritual perfections. There is a reality in this know-
ledge and in this advancement capable of being verified by the
spiritual experience of writers in the New Testament as well as by
the experience of good men of all times. There is no conscious
reality in theological knowledge and dogmatic advancement, and no
experience in or out of the Bible can ever verify it. It will not be
maintained, for instance, that in the present supposed determinate
form of creeds men know God more exactly (or are assured that they
thus know Him) than in the indeterminate period of the early Church.
The kind of knowledge in the creeds, and the kind of advancement
shown from the creed of Jerusalem or Csesarea or Niccea, through
Athanasius and the multiform reformed confessions, are opposed to
genuine spiritual knowledge and advancement, as they are opposed
to knowledge and advancement in the Bible sense of the words ;
for, as has been said, theological articles are " precisely of that sort
which devils may believe and still be devils." The other knowledge
is a spiritual power conforming us to itself and known oommensu-
rably with this conformation. Theology supposes, on the contrary,
that the Scripture contents have in an isolated form what, by ratio-
cinative processes, may be changed into the universal truth of
spiritual existences. I for one do not in the least doubt that there
is law in the spiritual sphere as well as elsewhere, order and not
disorder, music and not discord. Theology, however, is certainly
not the sacred harmonic. The higher unity is perceptible only to
one, like Christ, who made God's will His. In this sense we say
with Hooker that " all things in heaven and earth do law homage :
the very least as feeling her care, and the greatest as not exempted
from her power, both angels and men and creatures of what condi-
tion soever, though each in different sort and manner, yet all with
uniform consent and manner, admiring her as the mother of their
peace and joy." " The peace of God " is the highest expression of
a spiritual life according to law. There was a law in Christ's, death
when it behoved Him to suffer. There was perfect conformity to
this law in Him when He said, " My peace I leave with you." But,
even on this view of it, spiritual law is not the rationalised ex-
pression of verbal facts, but the perfection of a life hid with Christ
in God.

It may not be out of place in the present connection to state that
scientific men see very keenly the absurdity of a so-called science

240 REASON AND REVELATION.

of theology, and their opinion on the point is to be preferred to that
of one who is only a theologian, and who will naturally magnify his
office. It is not that these men discuss formally this quasi-science,
but they naturally leave it out of all their systems in the related
sciences as without the pale of scientific method.

It is in pure theology that the battles, as they are termed, be-
tween science and religion have originated : in reality, they are only
between science and theology. After making all possible allowance
for theology, one can see little in it but much thin metaphysics,
bad philosophy, and questionable thinking, or at best, good think-
ing applied to very sorry purpose. What problem has ever been
solved by the science, and whoever expects a rational explanation
of any extensively vital question from a theological quarter? We
look eagerly to physical science, to moral and political science,
for elucidation on many points of inquiry and reliable explanation
of phenomena; we look that theological dogmatics should merely
hang on the rear of science, and impede its advance. It has lost
very much the character of an independent growth, and become
parasitic in its nature. The most notable additions made to it are
mechanical adhesions, originating in the theological mode of viewing
questions in the domain of other sciences or in that of general
philosophy. Beaten from its ground, or feeling its tenure there uneasy,
it is attempting to take the position of something like a philosophia
prima. It will be said by those who defend the science of dogmatics
that they have authority for their procedure in the practice of Paul —
that Paul has made the truths of revelation a subject of rational
investigation, and laid the foundation of a Christian dogmatic. The
mere fact that the leading ideas and the point of view of Paul are
generally adopted in systematic theology gives some faint show of
truth to this opinion. But Paul's rationalising was rather in the
way of illustrating argument for some special purpose than with the
view of building up dogma or of giving the rationale of Divine facts.
His theology, if he has any such, bears the evident mark of mere
temporariness, an unfailing note of all that is not purely religious
and spiritual. Christ, at all events, did not philosophise. He pre-
sented to men His life principles unmodified, or only in the slightest
degree modified, by phases of thought, and accordingly susceptible
of adaptation to the state of thought at any time in the world's
history. What is apparently theological in Paul no one can have
any hesitation in holding as a mark of his age merely, just as the
mythology, ethics, physics, and customs and manner of thought

THE BIBLE AND THEOLOGY. 241

generally in the Bible, are temporary. If Paul or any of the Bible
writers give theories, we may be certain that they are theories in
consonance with the times in which they lived ; bat we are no more
nnder obligation to accept their systematic theology, if they have
such, than we are bonnd to accept their mode of interpreting the
Old Testament Scriptures.* A good many of Paul's arguments
are local, and to the modern mind, to say the least of it, sound flat
and inapplicable. Many of them, so far as we are concerned, are ir-
revalent and anything but forcible, and we are compelled to change
our position in order to see their point. Not a few of the difficulties
with which he contends are purely Jewish difficulties, and do not
spontaneously occur to us, but have to be created in our minds. A
good many preachers, following the practice of theological teachers,
would make them universal ; but they really raise the difficulties by
an exercise of imagination and a more or less historical knowledge,
and answer them easily without one resisting hearer.

A distinction has to be made, in writings like those of the apostles,
between the permanent principles and the mere arguments in sup-
port of the principles. The arguments are almost invariably local.
And this kind of provincialism is evident in many of Paul's writings,
although it is never difficult to distinguish what is local from what is
universal in them. It is this provincial tone that gives such genuine
reality to everything he writes, as we see that it does to other
powerful thinkers. We have no call, however, to transplant the pro-
vincialism into modern thought, with which it cannot amalgamate.
It was only the outside of Paul's teaching ; the mannerisms of the
man are consequent on his position in history. The marrow of
his doctrine and the heart of the apostle have no local colouring,
and in what might be called his reflective religious writings it is the
new life in Christ that is the subject of his thought. His science,
if I may say so, is more like the beginning of a spiritual psychology.
It is possible that, even speaking exactly, semi-spiritual questions
may yet be treated scientifically. At the first blush such investiga-
tions promise to yield more to scientific methods than the questions
embraced under dogma. As I said before, there is large scope for the
application of many sciences to the Bible teaching. These sciences
are, however, not purely Biblical sciences, but simply the application

* No conception of inspiration can be at all adequate that lifts the Biblical
writers out of their historical position, and the limitation that this position
implies.

K

242 REASON AND REVELATION.

of general sciences to the national literature of the Jews, and the
outcome of early Christian thought. These general sciences when
thus specially applied, have hitherto, in the hands of the professed
theologian, been subordinated very much to dogmatic belief. Were
they applied by the purely scientific intellect, the gain would be
inestimable. A3 it is, the men to whom this work is entrusted,
though capable in the highest degree so far as learning and natural
ability go, are often incapacitated by restrictions imposed upon them
as clergymen. Science and dogmatics contending with each other
in the same mind cannot produce speedy or valuable results. In the
case of different personalities dogma has done anything but accelerate
science. In almost any way, therefore, in which one looks at syste-
matic theology, it presents to us an aspect decidedly unscientific.
It is hostile to a purely spiritual life, the enemy of scientific investi-
gation ; and it is both, because it is false as a method of spiritual
knowledge.

CHAPTER XV.

THE BIBLE AND SCIENCE.

" 1 find more and more that people employ the Scriptures very little for those
purposes for which they are designed, but instead of this, use them the more for
ends never intended."

The attitude of science towards religions truth, as shown by its
representatives, varies somewhat with the age. Bacon was able to
say in his day that sacred and inspired divinity was " the sabbath
and port of all men's labours and peregrinations." A leading
physicist of the present day, speaking of science says that " science
and philosophy are neither Christian nor nn- Christian, bnt extra-
Christian, and have a world of their own."* Both statements, if not
true to history and the facts of the present, ought to be. We know,
however, that divinity has been anything bnt a halcyon quiet to
those who have sailed its waters or to those who are now sailing
them ; nor can we say that science now or at any time has been
careful not to give grounds for the charge of being either Christian
or un-Christian, by maintaining a strict neutrality. This iB not
always, nor in most cases primarily, the blame of scientific men, but
more frequently that of theologians, who have at the same time
desecrated Bacon's " sabbath " through the unseemly brawls pro-
duced by such conflict, and by opening certain flood-gates have let a
heavy sea into his " port."

There are 'men like Paracelsus who pretend to find in the Bible
not only what is considered specially religious truth, but in addi-
tion to this, all or a considerable part of natural philosophy as well.
Even if we limit the truth conveyed through the Bible to what is
more strictly considered religious truth, we do not find the unan-
imity we might expect as to what is religious truth P An opinion
is occasionally met with, and if we do not misunderstand him,
Mr. Martineau lends it his support in objecting to Butler's argu-
ment from analogy, according to which the Bible is a kind of sup-
plement to clear up the riddles of nature. It is not our concern
to defend Butler in this place, but Mr. Martineau's strictures on

* Professor Huxley : " Lay Sermons and Lectures."

r 2

244 REASON AND REVELATION.

the argument from analogy lose all their cogency on account of
the theory of Scripture revelation on which they are based. He
says, with an apparent show of plausibility, that there can be no
proper analogy between Scripture and nature on the side of their
inexplicability. This objection, however, rests on a confusion of
two things. If Butler had said that the analogy between nature
and revelation holds in the very same things, as for example, that
nature is obscure in teaching who was her author, and that the
Bible shows the same obscurity, there would be force in Mr. Mar-
tinean's objection that the Bible in this sense of it was no revela-
tion, since it merely sets before us the same riddles that we find in
nature. But Butler does not say this, nor would there, in such a
case, be any room for the analogy he purposes to show. It is be-
cause there are difficulties in both, but difficulties of a separate class,
that we can be entitled to draw any analogy between them.
Butler neither held, as some do, that the Bible was a republica-
tion, on authority, of mere natural religion, nor what Mr. Martineau
seems to hold, that it was an explanation of what was else inex-
plicable in nature; but, on the contrary, that it was a system of
spiritual things co-ordinate with the natural system, having os-
tensibly the same source or author, and, as might be expected, hav-
ing analogous difficulties. Its end being different, according to
Butler it could not have the same difficulties that we find in nature,
nor could it concern itself with solving these difficulties. Butler
states at the very outset in the words of Origen the scope of his
argument : "he who believes the Scripture to have proceeded from
Him who is the author of nature may well expect to find the
same sort of difficulties in it as are found in the constitution of
nature." It is new relations that the Bible makes known to us, not
the explanation of relations already known ; and the analogy is, as
stated in one place, that there is reason to think that neglect of
behaving suitably to the former will be attended with the same
kind of consequences as neglecting to behave suitably to the latter.
The position is so variously illustrated, that examples crowd upon
us, e.g., that there is an analogy between the Christian dispensation
and the natural scheme of things in the employment of means to
accomplish ends; that there is the credibility that the Christian
dispensation may be carried on by general laws as has been noticed,
as well as the course of nature, because even in the latter it is but in
few respects and an exceeding little way that we can trace natural
things to law ; and on Mr. Marti neau's own objection Butler re-

THE BIBLE AND SCIENCE. 245

marks, we " cannot read a passage relating to this great mystery
of godliness bnt what immediately runs np into something which
shows ns onr ignorance in it, as everything in natnre shows our
ignorance in the constitution of nature." The propriety of the ana-
logy between Scripture and nature on the side of their inexplica-
bility is in Butler's scheme quite indisputable, since, as he argues,
" our ignorance is as much an answer to our objections against the
perfection of the one as against the perfection of the other."

That there are difficulties in Scripture, and difficulties compatible
with a revelation we need not go beyond itself to prove. We know
in part, one of its latest writers says ; that which has been revealed
is not a full revelation in the sense of a full unfolding of what is
otherwise mysterious, or we may say that Scripture, like nature, is
not fully known, and that the difficulties which we meet with in both
may not be in them but in ourselves. But even were the Scrip-
ture revelation to be acknowledged complete in its own sphere, that
is no reason why it should complete other spheres of truth. If
the Scripture purported to be a supplement to our natural know-
ledge, which Mr. Martineau seems to take it to be, — that is, explain-
ing what in nature is dark and mysterious and problematical, — then
it would belie the actual state of its contents, for on none of the
many points of a pure kosmical origin does it throw such higher
knowledge. But revelation pretends to no such place. It is evi-
dently not intended as an appendix to knowledge naturally acquired,
or an explanation of nature-problems, but an opening of a new
world, a revelation of the spiritual and unseen. Nor need this re-
velation be necessarily so clear as seems to be imagined. It accords
well enough with our notion of revelation that for the present one
side of the exceeding glory may only be seen. We have not, it is
quite true, explored all its depths and hidden recesses. Perhaps if
we had, we should find it wealthier, than we can imagine, in spiritual
truths — not in sensible knowledge, in which we shall certainly find
it poorer ; erven as in nature time and experience unravel many sup-
posed physical mysteries, while they appear to drive farther back all
imagined spiritual truth.

There are some who hold that while the Bible gives us a correct
view of religious truth both in theory and practice, it gives no
theories on natural subjects to which we are bound to give any re-
gard ; that the Scriptures do not, as some have supposed, anticipate
any natural science. But this class of thinkers also hold that al-
though we cannot look for the same scientific exactness in physical

246 ' BEA80N AND REVELATION.

knowledge in the Bible as we have at present, there is perfect
practical accuracy in describing these matters, and that the sacred
penmen, as they are called, were kept from gross blunders; that
in fact what is called inspiration applies to the details of ordinary
knowledge in Scripture.

The first thing that strikes one when such theories are mentioned
is the extreme improbability of them. It does not seem the likeliest
thing that a revelation of spiritual truth should at the same time
contain a revelation of general knowledge. On the common sup-
position of those who argue for it, the one is capable of being
known by us, while the other is not. And even supposing that
spiritual truth were a development of man's spiritual nature, it is
a very possible thing that this development might not be accom-
panied by a corresponding development of the other side of his
nature. The ground on which a supernatural revelation of spiritual
facts is generally argued is that of man's incapacity of arriving
independently at an adequate knowledge of such facts ; but it would
be no sufficient reason for such a revelation to those who argue in
this way that it communicated knowledge which we were quite cap-
able of acquiring ourselves.

Of the various opinions we have mentioned, most people will in
mere logical consistency confess to a preference for that of Para-
celsus. If the Bible does teach us science, there seems no middle
ground between holding that it teaches all the sciences and main-
taining that its teaching and foresight are lacking in scientific
precision. It comes, therefore, to be a question between Paracelsus
and the extreme view of a modern school, that the Bible reflects
the natural imperfections in knowledge of the people and the times
in which it was written. We must, accordingly, either accept its
dicta on these matters, or criticise them with the freedom with
which we would criticise the views of any other book or people. Not
only so, but we must, if we hold the first alternative, begin scientific
investigations, as we begin theological inquiry, with the data that the
Bible furnishes, and rationalise these into physical dogma. On such
a supposition it is simply waste of time for us laboriously to toil in
the observation of nature and man, when the explanations lie em-
bedded in an unerring book. Laboratories may be shut up, for the
experiments have been already made, and the result tabulated ; geo-
logists may suspend their survey; governments may save money
spent hitherto on deep sea dredgings ; enthusiastic observers need
run no further risk in watching volcanic action ; travellers may stay

K"

THE BIBLE AND SCIENCE. 247

at home, for the earth's formation is authoritatively settled ; physio-
logists, ethnologists, moralists, socialists, and speculators in general,
are doing tentatively and imperfectly what has been done completely,
since the problems of man and nations, the questions of ethics and
politics, and the large themes of philosophy are subjects of divinity
and contained in the Scripture. Either this, or we must desist
looking to the Bible for any of these things. It is either the sum
of the sciences, or it has no place in scientific inquiry. If it is only
authoritative in some branches of science, where shall we draw the
line? Shall it be at any of the physical sciences, and if bo, at
which of them, and why ? These questions are of more importance
than one would imagine. It is not now so usual to hear arguments
drawn from Scripture in support of a system of tithes, e.g., as it
was a few years ago. The authority of the sacred text for the
Divine right of kings has waned in modern times ; and it is not so
generally thought to lend its countenance to slavery and prosecution
for witchcraft. Good sense and general cultivation have come to
the rescue of a bad theology, and exploded a great many of these
social theories based on Scriptural authority. But there is a mode
of thought in theology at present that proceeds on precisely the
same view of the Bible. Its position is higher, however, inasmuch
as it does not seek to buttress special opinions by Divine revelation,
but places this revelation over against all scientific theories what-
soever. It is not now sought merely to quote a Biblical author as
countenancing some current state of society, but it is proposed to
bring the conclusions of science to the bar of the Bible. It is not
thought sufficient that a well verified induction should commend
itself to the reason of man, but it must also commend itself to the
Hebrew intelligence. It is well that the question should have
reached a position like this. It is only in keeping with the un-
deniable superiority of the Bible, that, if it possess the character of
a standard in these matters, it must be the ultimate test. An
intermediate test is worse than none at all. Finality is the one
condition of any legitimate standard. Either, then, there is no ap-
peal to the Bible in the investigations of natural phenomena, or it is
the ultimate court of appeal. And it is this either in every science
or in none. For if you exclude its authority in any, you impugn
what is contended for by those who would extend its jurisdiction
into the physical sphere, viz., its universal prevision; or you make
this prevision merely arbitrary, with no guiding principle for those
who would bow to it, unless the temperament of the individual.

248 REASON AND REVELATION.

There is nothing so good as facts for proving or disproving
a theory, and no one with the Bible in the one hand, and the
legitimate inferences of science in the other, can doubt for a
moment whether or not the Bible is in the relation of a standard
to science. To those who are acquainted with scientific discus-
sion it is plain on the face of the Scripture record, that ques-
tions have arisen and are daily opened up which never occurred
to any writer in the Bible, or at least of which, if they did occur,
none of them has left an account. If such questions are men-
tioned, how does it come about that they have never been dis-
covered by those whose professional duty it is to explore and
interpret the Bible, but have always and without exception been
the result of direct observation of outward phenomena. If, e.g.,
the kosmogony of Genesis gives the theory of the earth's forma-
tion, why did it require the suggestion of geology to discover this
science ? At the very beginning of the Bible we have, according
to one theory, a branch of natural science explained, and yet its cul-
tivation is overlooked until quite recent times, and theology is only
awakened to the consciousness of it through the sensible observation
of nature by physical philosophers. The history of the Jewish nation
is, however, at variance with any such supposition as the one now
under review. There is no evidence to support the opinion that as
a nation the Jews were given to scientific pursuits ; nor are there
marks in their literature to show that by revelation or otherwise they
know any more than their immediate neighbours on these points.
Their direct contributions to science are, as any history of scien-
tific thought will inform us, as small as the contributions of the
Australians. There is not one subject of pure intellectual research
that can be traced back to Hebrew culture. If the Jewish mind
did cultivate science, their conclusions must have been kept distinct
from their religious literature, and have at all events passed into
oblivion. There is nothing anticipatory even of the extraordinary
progress that man should make in this field of activity. There is
no method shown by which the way might be rendered easy to
after times. So far as pure science is concerned, no investigator
would have missed the Hebrew nation. Some no doubt think the
Jews have done positive injury to scientific thought ; but, as we shall
see, it is not they, but false interpreters who have done the harm. No
one thinks that African tribes have impeded the march of science,
because their culture is still, as regards most of them, in the lowest
condition. Their culture would only become a hindrance were Afri-

THE BIBLE AND SCIENCE. 249

can travellers to insist that every new advance in physical inquiry
should square itself with African notions, and make good its
position by proving that it did not contradict the African intelli-
gence. Not only are actual results against any hypothesis such as
that now mentioned, not only is the Hebrew language opposed to
any idea of high mental culture and abstract thought, the whole
purpose of the Bible is diametrically opposed to the conception of
its being in any way concerned with the communication of such
culture. If it be so concerned it falls infinitely below the unaided
efforts of men elsewhere in ancient and modern times. Its theories,
if we can so designate them, are childish by comparison with those of
some other ancient peoples. It must, in this respect, be pronounced
unhesitatingly a great failure. Not only has it shown itself meagre
in its communications on such points, but it has not supplied
impetus to further research. Those who look to it rest in it, and
if others had been content to do the same we might, so far as mere
material prosperity and intellectual accomplishments are concerned,
have been no better than savages.* Its purpose is a purely spiritual
one if we are to decide this question from the highest expression of
this purpose in Christ. If He troubled Himself about the dissemina-
tion of other kinds of knowledge, it were well that the evidence
should be produced. When He said, "I have finished the work which
Thou gavest Me to do," either this work of science was included or
it was not ; if it was, this was a mere boast, inasmuch as during
His whole public ministry He never touched upon a purely scientific
question, so far as the accounts of His life go ; He neither gave us
the way to the solution of these questions nor solved them. If this
work was not included, we are at a loss to see why men should act
and speak as if it had been.

If those who insist so much upon the infallibility of Scriptures in
science, considered what was implied in this infallibility, they would
see how very futile it was. There is no occasion, in the meantime,
to notice the necessary result of this mode of thinking upon our
minds, in cases of conflict between scientific thought and Bible
truth, such, for example, as doubt of its authority on points of
general knowledge, and even doubt on those points with which it
is chiefly concerned. It implies, however, a notion that spiritual

* The condition of savage life is not be confounded with the savage disposi-
tion ; and Christianity, we know, can adapt itself to the lowest culture as well
as to the highest.

250 SEASON AND REVELATION.

truth is incommunicable without a previous training in intellectual
knowledge. The absurdity of this is evident at first sight. A
spiritual revelation would have been postponed indefinitely if this
were the one condition of its acceptance. Very few will deny
that we still have mnch to learn of mere sensible knowledge;
and mnch that may alter our present vague surmises and state-
ments of it. So far as we can see, the progression in this direction
is infinite, but until this progression to infinitude has advanced
much further, a perfect exactitude in general truth is impossible
for us, and, according to the supposition, spiritual truth must re-
main for an indefinite period beyond our reach. Of course, what
applies to us applies equally to the Jews. If Christ, e.g., had
burdened His Divine mission with what seems a small matter to
some minds, viz., the removal of erroneous views on physics, a
three years' mission would not have sufficed for such a gigantic
task alone. Unless by pure miracle, as the present state of know-
ledge shows, geological eras would have been needed, even by a
Divine messenger, for effecting such a result. If every other
Divine teacher had prefaced his spiritual mission with a crusade
against intellectual ignorance, every one sees that the work of
his life would never have been approached. We have only
to calculate the intellectual prejudices, in which ignorance en-
trenches itself, to estimate approximately the insurmountable diffi-
culties that lie in the way of such a plan of spiritual redemption.
The spiritual benefit would have been refused although good in
itself, because mingled with what was contrary to universal belief
in other matters. Almost every one who acknowledges a revelation
at all acknowledges that it was in a way a gradual unfolding of the
Divine will — that there was a correspondence between it and men's
capacities for its reception ; what is there opposed to such a view
in the supposition that whatever other elements might be in that
revelation corresponded to the then state of society? If we say
without offence that the spiritual position of the patriarchs was
greatly inferior to ours, how should it be considered so great a
matter when we say that their general culture is not to be com-
pared with ours P We should expect that many a Jew would have
very much doubted the message of a prophet or teacher who came
to them with a new spiritual truth if its acceptance depended
upon an entire alteration of their mental habits. If a Jew had been
obliged suddenly to revolutionise his theory of the heavenly bodies,
e.g., before he could know the name of Jehovah and feel His love,

THE BIBLE AND SCIENCE. 251

we know how insuperable a barrier such a requirement would have
raised in his mind. The battle of knowledge with ignorance is too
keen and undecided for any man of common wisdom to make so
important a matter as spiritual life dependent on the success of its
issue.

We ourselves are guided by the principles that are evidently acted
upon in the Bible. Christian missionaries, I suppose, do not begin
their work by rectifying the philosophical and physical blunders of
those to whom they explain their spiritual message. At least, it is not
generally understood that special acquirements in the sciences, such
as those necessary in theology, are exacted from applicants for mission
work. Nor do we find that the special difficulties with which they
have to contend are difficulties that spring from a backward state of
mental culture. No one thinks that when Ulfilas translated the
gospels the Goths had very correct' notions of any science, although
they might be capable of appreciating spiritual truth and entering
upon a spiritual life. When Christianity was embraced by our
ancestors, they were not men skilled in the wisdom of this world.
Paul himself tells us as a general truth in the spiritual life, and we
are accustomed to hear it boasted of in some of our churches, u that
not many wise men after the flesh, . . . not many noble are
called ; " but these wise men and noble are apparently just the men
that have the preparation thought necessary by modern theology for
the reception of spiritual truth. When the progress of Christianity
is touched upon one of the points invariably noticed is, that illiterate
fishermen were the means of its first promulgation, which is con-
sidered a practical exemplification of a Biblical sentiment, that God
hath chosen the weak things of this world as His instruments in
the advancement of the spiritual kingdom — that he hath ordained
strength out of the mouth of babes and sucklings ; but this would
be utterly irrelevant, if it is at the same time supposed that these
fishermen had been supernaturally raised above the men of their time,
not only in spiritual life and insight but in scientific knowledge.
That would be a reversal of the spiritual process, and would look
like choosing the things that are mighty to confound the weak. We
may rest persuaded that Paul and the psalmist are correct and the
theologians wrong. One would imagine that, every theory of inspi-
ration aside, the men who doubtless spoke their own experiences
were nearer the truth than those who judge merely by inferences
drawn sometimes from doubtful facts. It is both difficult to observe
facts and to draw inferences, when the correct facts are got. Some

252 REASON AND REVELATION.

writers pronounce very confidently on what the Savionr, for ex-
ample, knew, and what He did not know, and while considering it
somewhat hazardous to do so unless in a very general way, I think
the words that Milton puts into Christ's mouth might well enough
he put into the mouths of any of the writers of the Bible as a de-
scription of the extent of their knowledge and culture :

" If I would delight My private hours,
With music or with poem, where so soon
As in our native language, can I find
That solace?"

There has already been occasion to notice how little any one could
learn of science or philosophy from such a source. Amos is a good
type of many of these simple men, and we see no affectation of
knowledge incongruous with his humble occupation, or with the idea
that the culture of his spirit was supplied by the sacred literature
of his nation, joined to that " light from above," — the fountain of
light, which rendered him independent of other sources. To make
any point in the wide field of scientific knowledge which has been
opened since the time of Amos amenable to the herdsman of Tekoa, is
quite as great a confusion of thought as it would be to consult a
nomadic chief on the practical application of scientific theories to
commerce and manufacture, because he might chance to possess the
rude textures which are the fruit of primitive ingenuity.

From a desire to deal plainly with this question of Biblical authority
in the matter of ordinary and scientific thought, any one may be
asked to compare the state of physical investigation in any known
part of the ancient world during the time embraced by the Jewish
records, with the present position of such inquiries, and honestly say
if there could be any prospect of forward movement so long as we
maintained such a backward inclination as led us to test our achieve-
ments by their crude results. Our references to them would be like
the consultation of oracles that are dumb. They knew hardly any-
thing of the very attitude of our minds towards a phenomenal world.
The questions we ask are only those that we ourselves can articulate,
and presuppose all the lapse of years and accumulated experiences
between them and us. We might as well consult children about the
calculus as consult an ancient Jew about certain physical truths, or,
what is the same thing, make violent efforts to accommodate them to
his supposed notions of them. The Bible has about as much to do
authoritatively with scientific questions in electricity as it has to do
with a system of telegraphic communication ; it has as much to do

THE BIBLE AND SCIENCE. 253

authoritatively with scientific questions in physiology as it has with
a system of dietetic* ; it has as much to do with scientific questions
in geology as it has with practical questions in agriculture relating
to the nature of the soils. And if the telegraph clerk does not dream
of consulting it why should Franklin P if the medical practitioner
does not think of acting according to its rules, why should Darwin
be obliged to think according to its statements P if the farmer should
not farm according to its methods, why should Hutton make his
inferences in accordance with its conclusions P If, after all, it is said
that its sphere is universal truth, and that our sciences come within its
sweep, I am anxious to know why our civil constitution or any prac-
tical matter is not also included. If it is like the koran in its minute
directions and communications regarding every likely occurrence in
life, is it also like the koran in having overlooked some very impor-
tant combination of circumstances that did not formerly exist, or what
is the same thing, which for the writers had no existence P Since it
seems to contain much more that is practical than theoretical, why
are we to make it our criterion in speculation and not in practical
application? If also, as it happens, there is a difference of opinion
regarding the classification of a subject such as ethics, e.g., which some
say is practical, others scientific, is the Bible to be a rule to the one,
and to be null and void to the other P Many will say this is mere
banter. It may be to them ; but to those who are anxious to have
some kind of, method in thought, it is of the utmost consequence that
a measure which has such pretensions as this Biblical one should be
most strictly determined and rigidly conformed to. If there be a
mode of verification hitherto unnoticed in all systems of logic and un-
applied in actual thought, the sooner it is described and insisted on
the better. It is quite impossible that the present chronic state of
open or concealed enmity between the Bible and science can continue
with advantage to either. If students of the Bible as such have the
right to put a veto upon the labours of the students of nature as
such, they must show the character and extent of this right. It can-
not longer be left to be exercised according to personal caprice. The
time has come for those who have so long done this, to methodise and
explain the principle of their action. If they are not able to do so
within some degree of correctness, they are not fit to employ the
instrument. Hitherto, science has presented something more resem-
bling a parliamentary debate than a calm investigation of eternal
truth. Its subjects have been questions of party feeling rather than
of principle. It may be that, as in practical legislation so in abstract

254 REA80N AND REVELATION.

thought, truth is to be reached by the combined effort of a conserva-
tive and liberal policy — that, principle and reason apart, and merely
on account of birth or some other less important accident, a clergy-
man, like a tory squire to the radical manufacturer, should act the
drag to the philosopher. If it is only a matter of tactics it is per-
fectly explicable and might be easily met. Whatever be the idea of
the relation that exists in the minds of those who criticise science
from the standpoint of the Bible, it greatly concerns both the Bible
and science that it be defined with the greatest precision.

For my part it is not at all doubtful what this relation is. The
Bible has, and has not, to do with science. It has to do with it just
as any people's literature may have to do with it ; and it has not to do
with it any more than no national literature has to do with it, to the
extent of being an authority from which there is no appeal. The
Jewish and Christian religion, we have seen, had one very marked
characteristic, viz., that its literature was Divine and human. The
entire development of spiritual truth which it contains was through
human forms, and eminently historical. It is a religion, besides,
as we shall afterwards see, that is strictly moral, blending with
all the relations of life, and indeed with the entire activity of man :
and being such, we should expect that with ;the record of this
revelation all these relations would be interwoven. As the Jews
could not have handed this revelation down to us without at the
same time handing down the structure of their language by which
it was communicated, so neither could they do so, it being as it is,
without conveying to us some of their general opinions and beliefs.
And as we are no more bound to account the language a perfect
model for the transmission of thought, nor even specially Divine, as
some have done, so neither are we under any necessity of accepting
their mythology and philosophy as the ultimata in scientific thought,
as others now do. Their language shows distinctly three stages, —
a more archaic form, a growth to comparative maturity, and a deca-
dence. There is no speciality in that. Their ordinary beliefs present
the appearance of those met with elsewhere. They were not simply
a religious race, they were men with a body of thoughts on things
around them, and we have in their history not a series of religious
dogmas isolated from common life, but in closest connection with it.
It is thus that we have pictures of the early form of government
that prevailed among them and of their later polity, because their
religion was one in vital relation to every state of social existence,
and the account of their religion involves an account of the con-

THE BIBLE AND SCIENCE. 255

dition of society in which it was embodied in some of its aspects.
Haying a national existence and possessing a history, like all
nationalities, the Jews trace this history beyond the memory of
man into the dim regions of an uncertain tradition expanded and
illuminated by the poetic imagination. And so we have a primeval
history, or half legendary narrative where facts may have vanished,
but where the imaginative personages are true to the nation that
claim them as their progenitors — their faith, their customs, and
their mode of life being one. They have a kosmogony, as every
people has ; but it is a kosmogony, on its spiritual side, in keeping
with the Jewish religion. They have myths, else were they more
than human ; but these myths show the same religious spirit. We
can see from their records the simple views they entertained on
astronomy, ethnology, and other subjects of investigation, as well as
the condition in which the arts of life flourished among them at
different periods. There are few subjects of interest to the an-
tiquary or the student of culture but what may be illustrated from
the Jewish records as well as from the records and traditions of
any nation. We may see the mode in which the Hebrews regarded
these questions, just as we may collect from various sources the
advancement made in the solution of them by other peoples. As
a contribution to the history of primitive manners and beliefs, and
furnishing with others a basis of comparison, these records are of
the greatest interest to the man of science. As conclusions by
which he is to abide in his independent researches, they are alto-
gether useless ; to elevate them into this position is to mistake their
nature entirely. They are facts of historical development, and
they may take their place along with facts of a like nature, but
they ought never to be confounded with certified conclusions from
facts. Because such and such things are mentioned in the Bible
it is concluded that they are authoritatively taught by it. Because
the problems of Euclid were communicated in Greek must Euclid
be also held as teaching the Greek tongue P

Now-a-days religion is mingled necessarily with what we may con-
sider as not strictly religions. A man of undoubted piety may give
expression to the veriest crudity in speculation, but his religion is
distinct from that. It was not otherwise with the Jews. The whole
development of a man is seldom carried forward at once ; no more is
the development of a body of men. Great spiritual progress is not
incompatible with a backward state of scientific thought. Ton may
have a moral nature of great depth and purity, and united to it an

256 REASON AND REVELATION.

intelligence which has not been trained in any school of philosophy,
nay, with even lingering superstitions beliefs on certain subjects. So
also yon may have a man of fine aesthetic capacity with a compara-
tively low moral tone, and the reverse. When we say so we are very
far from saying that it would not be better otherwise : that a moral
life would not be widened by intelligence; that taste would not be
purified and ennobled by union with a conscience that moved re-
sponsive to the Divine law ; that the conscience itself would not be
perfected by being wedded to a soul keenly susceptible to all that
was beautiful. We cannot pronounce with any certain approach to
exactness what would be the effect of a conjunction of all that was
highest in man, but one sees constantly a high spiritual life with-
out anything like a corresponding elevation of mental culture.
Indeed, the present relation of science to the Bible very much prevents
us witnessing anything else unless in rare and exceptional cases.
And if such a combination is not impossible now, how do we con-
sider it unlikely in former times ? If Peter, James, and John were
not indoctrinated into Greek philosophy ; if Paul had no insight
into modern methods of thought before becoming an apostle of the
new spiritual life to man, — why must we suppose that Moses or any
of his historians, David or any of the poets of the Old Testament,
should be familiar with truths in celestial physics that were only
possible in recent times P Bunyan had no need to become a Newton
in order himself to travel, and point others the way, to the Eternal
City.

The general answer to this will probably be, that no one now-a-
days insists on the extreme view of Paracelsus ; but, I might reply,
if some were consistent, they ought to do so. The opinion, we are
told, held by those who believe in an infallible book is merely, that
the writers were preserved from error in speaking on physical and
philosophical questions, and from inadvertence in their narratives
and chronological tables. We need not ask at the present day what
a correct view of the earth's position relative to the sun has to do
with the gift of eternal life by Jesus Christ, or what effect the cor-
rectness of a list of names can have upon a scheme of salvation
devised, as we are told in the same breath, in the counsels of Jehovah
from all eternity, and which would remain a fact, in spite of all
solar theories, and be operative on human society, although every
genealogical tree were cut down and destroyed. We do not ask these
questions, but we must consider what is supposed in such an ap-
parently insignificant demand upon our credulity. It is a much

THE BIBLE AND SCIENCE. 257

larger hypothesis than those who make it seem to think, and is in
point of fact equivalent to the extreme opinion just noticed. It is
proposed to hold that the Scripture authors write as if aware of the
general truths of a sensible experience that were unknown to their
contemporaries, which is simply that they were aware of what from
the nature of the case, they must have been entirely ignorant. They
could not have expressed themselves on many points with an appa-
rently full knowledge of the subjects without writing what was,
not only to themselves, but to others, pure nonsense. Writing in
the 6th century, B.C., e.y., how could they write intelligently, by
expressing themselves as if they were in the 19th century, a.d. P
Nay, how could they thus write at all ? Language has one side that
is flexible, but it has another that is most unyielding. Beliefs
long forgotten, and buried for centuries, linger in the language and
literature of a people. After an opinion is changed from false to
true, a long time elapses before a corresponding alteration is made
upon the vehicle of thought ; so that, even supposing the sacred
writers to have been divinely inspired in physical science, for example,
they would have required an inspiration in philology to have con-
structed a medium for the conveyance of this knowledge. Granted
that we can never tell what or how much they knew, we can always
tell, by signs that are unmistakable,. what they communicated. The
Hebrew language, as a language, will not, by the wildest theorist,
be held as Divinely given, but developed like other languages, and
corresponding always to the general state of culture of those who
employed it. And writers, whether inspired or not, have clearly
accommodated themselves to this, or, what is nearer the truth,
have used the language without any consciousness of accommoda-
tion, but with an evident ease, as finding it the natural and only
instrument fitted for their purpose. So that this protection from
error really amounts to the supernatural communication of a very
positive advance in knowledge to those who wrote as well as those
for whom it was written, and a miraculous development of the lan-
guage in which they wrote. A man's beliefs are not detached de-
posits in his mind, and of such a nature that one may be removed
without affecting another. They are related and co-related in many
ways, and a mechanical guidance, such as that spoken of, would con-
tradict the known laws of our mental life. In every way in which it
may be viewed, the theory is beset with difficulties, and is, above
all things, contradictory to facts.

A great many minds are naturally much shocked at the idea of a

s

258 SEASON AND REVELATION.

theory of accommodation as a mode of explanation of Bible difficul-
ties, and this is as it should be. It is in opposition to snch a theory
that we are arguing. There has been far too much tendency in relig-
ious questions, and even in those that are most vital to Christianity,
to regard them in a merely arbitrary light. It is the worst case of
accommodation imaginable by us, that a man should be made to write
what is to him and others false, in order that those to whom he did
not write — at least not immediately, and, as we have elsewhere seen,
probably not intentionally, in however remote a way — might not be
misled. It is not necessary to suppose accommodation when we
understand that the men are writing naturally, in the language and
thought-colouring of their time. The accommodation arises when
they write in the language and thought of another time. There is
vitality and history in the former case ; in the latter there can be
neither.* There is nothing, perhaps, that can give to the expert a
note of time more exactly than particular stages of thought or lan-
guage; but to suppose thought and language accommodated — as
they must have been on the theory to which I refer — to the highest
possible development of either (for accommodation is manifestly of
no avail, unless carried to this pitch) would be to efface every mark of
time, and render the Christian religion altogether unhistorical. I
have already pointed out that there are imperfections in the lan-
guage of the Scripture writers, and I am altogether unable to see
that imperfections should abruptly stop there. If the actual ac-
quirement of the Jews in the use of language is to be found in the
Bible, why should their real attainment in thought, of which lan-
guage is in one way the external manifestation, be not also given ?
If grammarians and philologists can set to work on pure scientific
principles with the Hebrew, or with any other Semitic tongue,
or with any one of the other family of languages, they are doing
neither more nor less than we ask the liberty to do with the beliefs
and opinions in which the Hebrew language had its origin. As the
Bible contains facts for a comparative view of languages, so does it
contain facts for a comparative view of culture. And as we do not

* I might say that in the first oase there is truth and individuality, as against
what looks like deception and the outcome of an impersonal agency in the
second. The Bible, instead of being, as I think it is, a natural growth of the
human spirit and the Divine, would be an altogether unnatural product, if it
were composed in the artificial manner we are asked to believe. It would be
superfluous, under such a supposition, to seek to account for the authorship of
the various books, which could have none.

THE BIBLE AND SCIENCE. 259

erect the facts of its language into a ne plus ultra in the science of
the symbols of thought, neither should we erect its current opinions
into a ne plus ultra in thought itself. We do not bow to Matthew,
Mark, or Luke, to John, or Paul, in questions of style and elegant
expression ; why should we be obliged to submit to them in questions
of medicine and philosophy P We do not find that language, with its
many defects in these early times, has done anything to obscure the
splendour of a Divine revelation, nor shall we find that any human
imperfection whatever can quite conceal the excellence and perfec-
tion of what is heavenly. Contradictions between the Bible and
science there can be none ; but contradictions between men's views of
the Bible and science there are in plenty, as there will always be
contradictions between the false and the true. The Bible is not re-
sponsible for the science or pretended science built upon it. It does
not view the world with the scientific intellect, but with the religious
consciousness, and it clothes the feelings thus originated in the
simple and unaffected language of the time.

There never has been an objection, that could bear looking at,
brought against Christianity as a spiritual religion. Without excep-
tion they have been objections brought against many things which
a false theology has bound up with religion. With ill-directed
generosity men have undertaken to support as universal truths,
and even as vitally united with a spiritual revelation, statements
that are merely the historical facts of the growth of intelligence.
They have themselves believed, and made others imagine, that
spiritual truth might be assailed through these facts, and have
involved themselves in questionable answers to objections that were
pointless so far as regards the main question at issue. It may be
granted, once for all, that you can match the early myths of the
Hebrews with those of neighbouring nations,* that the Phoenicians,
Egyptians, Chaldees, and others with whom they came into contact,
contributed to their intellectual growth, and furnished them with
a body of tales and systems of beliefs that were interwoven with

* Distant tribes too. A Khond sect in India has a story very like that of
Abraham and Isaac. The members of that sect now sacrifice a buffalo to the
Light god, but tell us that the Earth goddess desired the sacrifice of men. The
Light god, however, sent a tribal deity who crushed the bloody goddess under a
mountain, and dragged a buffalo from the jungle, saying, " Liberate the man
and sacrifice the buffalo.' 1 It is quite possible, as has been suggested, that
both may record in myth the transition from human to animal sacrifice. Very
likely there was at the same time a change in the object of worship.

s 2

260 REASON AND EEVELATION.

those of native origin; that you may find a kosmogony and the
story of a flood in every nation ; that you may discover the exact
counterpart of the story of Eden in many lands, and the principle
underlying it in almost all ; that yon may convict the Hebrew
writers of as childish views of heaven and earth as other people,
of as unworthy and degrading superstitions, or of beliefs as fan-
tastical as those to whom no revelation such as theirs came. But
no candid reader of the Bible would look for anything else. There
is evident among the Jews a spiritual development, but there is no
sign of a special immunity from error in thought on ordinary
experiences. In the life eternal they were taught of God as we
must all be, if we are taught at ail; in the knowledge of the
sensible world around them they were taught as men from the
beginning have been, and, to all appearances, to the end will be
taught, viz., through gradual accumulations of experiences, and by
careful and methodical comparisons. Knowledge in itself, that is
not the result of inquiry and thought, is not so great a gain. A
greater gain than any special knowledge is the cultivation and per-
fection of our powers of knowing. If, therefore, the Hebrews were
exempted from pursuing the common road to wisdom, as some
appear to think, we cannot envy them, since they must have missed
the chief end of the acquisition of wisdom, the cultivation and per-
fection of their mental and moral nature. It is only by the exercise
of any function that its ideal excellence can be realised, and we
have no reason to think that the Jews were deprived of the only
means by which their powers of observation and thought could be
improved.* A spiritual advantage that implies an irreparable in-
tellectual loss of this kind would be, as we are constituted, a ques-
tionable gain.

This appears to be the place for remarking that, when it is ob-
jected, as it often has been, against the Jewish religion and revelation,
that the Jews in their treatment of the Canaanites, and in their exul-
tation over deeds of cruelty, as, for example, in one of their earliest
and most vigorous and apparently most genuine songs, exhibit a

* On the contrary, it is worth noting, that their first man, is according to one
account at least, represented as the founder of scientific investigation — that
naming, not by any means a contemptible accomplishment, was began by him.
Scientific inquiry and method have an antiquity and authority, for those who
care for such, that are seemingly beyond dispute. They are pursuits to which
the first man was introduced in a most unexceptionable way, by the Divine Being
Himself.— Gen. ii. 19, 20.

THE BIBLE AND SCIENCE. 261

condition of morality that is unworthy a people who had the know-
ledge of God which they are reported to have had, it is an objec-
tion that tells unmistakably against the view of Divine guidance in
every act of life and thought that has just been noticed. An answer
to an objection like this is precluded to those who contend for guid-
ance in every point. It is not open to them, as it would otherwise
be, to say, who cares to defend the moral development of the Jews
any more than their intellectual development? We do not seek
to defend such developments elsewhere. The proper course here, as
elsewhere, is explanation, not defence. Especially is it dangerous to
defend this feature of Jewish history, as Mr. Mansel has done, by the
extravagant supposition of a moral miracle — by what, to us, is worse
than the act that is sought to be defended — the idea that murder
may be a temporary suspension of morals and consistent with eter-
nal morality. I shall have to notice elsewhere this notion of eternal
morality ; but I may say here, that explanations intended to smooth
such acts down as the result of special precepts cannot escape the
prime difficulty, that they are expressions of a moral nature, which
we are bound to interpret by these manifestations of itself.

There are not many more puzzling questions in the New Testa-
ment than demoniacal possession, and yet the question is not confined
to it. Such phenomena have been, and still are, common to many
peoples. Indeed, not only were extraordinary cases of illness for-
merly, and even now, by some savage races ascribed to possession, but
all disease was familiarly traced to such a cause. Diseases were
treated as if this were the only cause. Medicine, as a consequence,
was in a great measure unknown, and artificial means were relied
upon to cure the patient, such as, sucking out or drawing off the
disease, as if it had a distinct personal existence. In Borneo sick
people are said to be smitten by a spirit. In New Zealand medical
practice has not gone beyond this stage, and it is known to the
Americans, Patagonians, East and West Africans.* The symptoms
found in these places resemble those described in the New Testa-
ment, viz., frantic gestures, convulsions, foaming at the mouth,
raving, and gnashing of teeth. It is well known that the same
belief was current among peoples who had a large influence on
Jewish opinion. And later on, in the early days of Christendom,
somewhere about the third century, demons adjured by the true
God, shuddered in the wretched bodies of those possessed, and came

* Tylor, " Primitive Culture."

v 1

262 REASON AND REVELATION.

forth. This is very likely to have been only a provincial way of
speaking about certain kinds of disease current among the Jews at
a particular stage of thought, as appears to have been the case else-
where. At all events, the Jewish diagnosis of a disease, even al-
though recorded in the New Testament, will scarcely be considered
an authority by a modern medical practitioner.

There is another mark of provincialism in speaking about spiritual
beings of opposite dispositions, which, if not derived from contact
with Persia and Assyria, was largely influenced by such contact ; I
mean the doctrine of angels. We find in some West African tribes
hierarchies among spiritual beings not altogether unlike the same
orders that we find in the Bible. And the Olympian divinities
also suggest the idea of a higher deity working through inferior
spirits.* Stricter investigation into the intellectual side of Juda-
ism and its relations to similar developments elsewhere will, no
doubt, furnish us with proofs of the temporary and formal nature
of much that has been hitherto considered eternal and material.
The whole question of what is universal, and what is merely pro-
vincial in Paul, is one of great interest. It will be necessary with
him, as with others, to see the eternal that shines through the
temporal ; to separate life-principles from the arguments by which
they were recommended to a particular people ; to distinguish Paul
the spiritual teacher from Paul the theologian and system maker.

From indiscriminate acceptance of whatever was written, no mat-
ter when or on what subject, and from the tendency to deduce from
this as from indubitable principles a system of truth, students of
the Bible have at every point found themselves opposed to the
conclusions of nature. The two spheres of spiritual and sensible
experience are not, therefore, to be concluded contradictory, nor as
needing any elaborate reconciliation. The oppositions that we
witness are not between science and spiritual truth, but, as has
been already said, between science and dogmatics, or erroneous
conclusions from spiritual truth, or, more frequently, conclusions
from the perishable moulds that held this spiritual truth. Spiritual
truth, as apprehended by a spiritual nature, which is the only
method of its apprehension, does not shun science, it courts it
rather. In a well balanced mind, although these truths are

* So close was the resemblance to Milton's mind, that he has not hesitated
to construct his poem on it. His angelic beings can war against the Supreme
Being, as the races of the gods fought against each other.

THE BIBLE AND 6CIENCE. 263

differently acquired, and, according to onr phraseology, which is
nsed for distinction only, in different spheres, for anything we can
tell they may belong, as the best minds have ever imagined, to the
same great tree of knowledge. Dogmatics, however, which are what
John Smith calls " the thin speculations of philosophy/' mingled
with more or less spiritual truth, may well seek to avoid an en-
counter with science and the scientific intellect. The theologian
if an encounter on any point is forced upon him, feeling himself
destitute of facts that form an immovable ground for the man of
science, is too much inclined, as has been said, " auf Gott zuruckzu-
greifen, um mit ihm, als einer bequemen Hypothese, die Erklarung
desselben, die ihnen zu viele Miihe macht, zum Schein zu geben."
But this hypothetical function of the Deity is the creation of a bad
philosophy. The relations of God made known in Scripture, as has
been observed again and again, are essentially spiritual, and the
means by which we are to know this Being is true to the great
design of the contents of revelation, in cultivating our spiritual
affections. These contents are not philosophical, either in the
metaphysical or scientific sense. They do not really, nor by
profession, complete the mere incompetences of reason. They
neither furnish answers to metaphysical inquiries nor do they
give scientific results, unless those that are subject to revision,
as all such answers and results coming from the intellect of man
must ever be. It is not to be wondered at, that men, basing these
so-called scientific conclusions on Scripture statements, and not on
observed physical facts which alone could warrant them, should
be compelled to relinquish their position by the advancement of
scientific inquiry. The mistake lies in identifying, as some do,
these conclusions with spiritual truth. It were to be wished that
those who are, as it is said, for the Bible as against modern science,
knew a little more of both. It is time we were beyond the position
of those who say all revelation and no reason, or of those who say
all reason and no revelation, and recognised what, we think, must
be the basal belief of every thoughtful mind, that " no truth can
contradict any truth ; " that we are not, on the one hand, outside of
revelation such absolutely drivelling creatures as some imagine us
to be ; nor, on the other, such independent rational beings as others
think ; that, as we cannot " call spirits from the vasty deep," so
neither can we educe from our own consciousness all that world of
spiritual truth, of life and light, which we find the soul of man
dowered with the capacity of appreciating.

264 REASON AND EEV ELATION.

In the position we have indicated it is possible to stand above
mere controversy on the question of the relation of the Bible to
science, and prepare the way for others who may be able to display
the consonance of all truth.

CHAPTER XVI.

RELIGIOUS IDEAS AND METAPHYSICAL CONCEPTIONS, WITH
REFERENCE TO SOME RECENT SPECULATION ON THE UN-
KNOWABLE, AND THE LIMITS OF RELIGIOUS THOUGHT.

There is .an opinion regarding religion and other forms of truth
pretty generally received at present, and which has much to render
it acceptable to some minds. It is in keeping with the spirit of
philosophical unity and desire for systematising so universal in man,
and also with that love for all forms of truth which such a spirit
and desire engender. The opinion I speak of is, that a reconciliation
may be effected between the two forms of truth, religious and
scientific, that are so often opposed, by stripping from religion that
which peculiarly and strictly belongs to it, and by lopping off from
Bcience that which is distinctively its own. The motto of those
who make this attempt is good, — in all erroneous things there is a
soul of truth, a sort of rough generalisation, like other striking
sayings that have been long current. The method of working out
the problem of reconciliation is, however, far from correct, and the
result, as might be anticipated, is neither satisfactory to scientific
nor religious truth. The representation drawn is, that in science
" positive knowledge does not and never can fill the whole region of
possible thought ; at the uttermost reach of discovery there arises and
must ever arise the question, — What lies beyond ? " * What is the
explanation of that explanation ? is always the question after any
new relations are discovered ; and every addition, so far from lessen-
ing the unknown, merely brings the known into wider contact with
the unknown. So that mental life shows two antithetical modes of
action, — on the one hand, science seeking the relations of ascertained
phenomena; and on the other, religion busying itself with the
" unascertained something which phenomena and their relations
imply." Science is concerned with the known, but as, according
to the theory now stated, there must always be something tran-
scending knowledge, there must always be room for religion, which

* Herbert Spencer, ** First Principles," p. 16.

266 REASON AND REVELATION.

peculiarly concerns itself with that which transcends experience.
These two, the known and unknown, are thns reckoned two
acknowledged facts, and any extreme on the one side or the other
is merely an exaggeration of a great truth. To bring the extremes
together needs only that each gives np its extravagances. To drop
from each that which each holds as its own, and so enable them to
unite on some ultimate something which both can hold, is the road
to reconciliation. It is remarked by the propounder of this scheme
of reconciliation, that, if religion and science are to be reconciled, the
basis of reconciliation must be the deepest and widest and most cer-
tain of all facts, viz., that the power which the universe manifests to
us is utterly inscrutable. The reason for this being apparently,
that ultimate scientific ideas, such as space, time, cause, etc., are all
representative of realities that cannot be comprehended, and that
ultimate" religious ideas are, according to a certain school in psycho-
l°gy> of the same nature ; and in this point of an incomprehensible
omnipotent Power to which science brings us, we have the con-
sciousness of that on which religion builds, and also the ground of
its coalescence with science.*

The more general criticism that may be made on such a view of
religion and science as that just summarised is, that it is more
nearly a representation of what is called metaphysics and science,
and never once touches the religious consciousness, or spiritual
truths, properly so-called, related to that consciousness. As an ex-
position of the metaphysical element in thought it may be exact, but it
must be added that the writer of it has entirely missed the sphere of
truth at which he was professedly aiming. As to any attempted recon-
ciliation of the sphere on which he has really fallen with that of
positive science, I am very much inclined to think that such a recon-
ciliation is wholly unnecessary, were it possible, which I am persuaded
is not the case. Positive science is clear and explicable and always
legitimate, dealing as it does with facts of sensible experience, to
which it can always be compelled to refer. Metaphysics as a science
is altogether illegitimate. It is true of it what the writer, to whom
reference has been made, says untruly of religious truth, that it tran-
scends experience. But how that which transcends experience has
need of reconciliation with experience we are unable to see. Many of

* Strauss, in his last work, has practically taken up this position; " ob wir Gott
oder Universum sagen," appears to him the same. "Wir fordern fur unser
Universum dieselbe Pietat, wie der Fromme alten stils fiir Seinen Gott."

BELIGIOUS IDEAS AND METAPHYSICAL CONCEPTIONS. 267

the questions which are commonly assigned to metaphysics can be
otherwise perfectly well explained, and others of them are problems
that no science can solve. Questions are often discussed that are
vaguely called metaphysical ; but this phraseology has come to have
something like a popular meaning, and signifies not unfrequently
that these questions are of rather an abstruse nature, and have been
banished from true scientific investigation and relegated not, as some
writers would have us believe, to the sphere of religious conscious-
ness, but to the realms of dream and moonshine, in other words, to
metaphysics. Many subjects of thought that have long been held
by some thinkers as peculiarly belonging to metaphysics, and round
which, accordingly, a strange charm has been thrown by metaphysical
imaginings, are such as these, — space and time, the idea of an external
world, rectitude, duty, and other abstractions, as also whether God
is a reality, whose existence is manifest to us a priori by the con-
stitution of our natural faculties. Because these and other questions
have arisen and must, perhaps, always be started by men, we may
be compelled to follow them ; but we are by no means compelled
(and this should always be remembered) to use the means for their
investigation so often resorted to, and as little are we bound to erect
a science or related sphere for their home. Their natural home, I
speak now of the form in which they are generally put, is in the
phantasmagoria of the human mind. The fact is, that the phase of
thought which Mr. Spencer mistakes for a religious one is that of
general speculation, excluding, of course, from this scientific inquiry,
and approaches more nearly a kind of intellectual exercise of imagina-
tion, a ranging forth upon ideas either in themselves or in their origin
imaginary, weaving them into many fanciful results, combining, en-
larging, unfolding all the scattered, broken hints of things or ideas
of things, and bodying them forth into a world of transcendent in-
tellectual and imaginative glory. It is imagination working in the
leash of logic. What is the general speculation of most ages, when
it transcends experience whether spiritual or natural, other than
this we have named ? We can have no wish to despise it. It has
proved in some respects, and in individual instances, a noble exercise
of mind, a splendid joy, and some of the greatest thoughts have
come to us through this means; but we must be careful to dis-
tinguish it, not only, as Mr. Spencer has done under a different name,
from scientific knowledge, but also from religious thought, both of
which are based on experience. The whole realm of so-called meta-
physical investigation, on the contrary, resembles just such a mental

268 EEASON AND REVELATION.

exercitation as that now described. Metaphysics is the poetry of
the intellect, no more. In some respects the best poetry that we
have inherited from the past ; the purest and the most elevated, at
its highest, unimpassioned, ethereal, beautiful, reminding us more of
heaven than of earth. Nothing material enters its domain, nothing
of time, of place, of individual. It is the finite attempting to re-
construct the infinite and the eternal ; and what noble essays to-
wards such a structure do not all times and literatures record from
Plato to Hegel !

But there is exhibited in this attempted reconciliation by Mr.
Spencer more than the confusion of " imagination in science " with
religious consciousness and religious truth. Although this is funda-
mental, there is, besides, an evident mis-conception as to the nature of
spiritual truth. It is represented as the last result of scientific inves-
tigation; and what is required to be reconciled is accomplished at the
outset by a definition of the spheres to be reconciled of feuch a nature
that the two spheres are represented as really one. Accordingly, all
that the reconciliation amounts to is, that science should call the
ultimate reach of thought based on sensible experience "an insoluble
enigma," and that religion should call the " insoluble enigma " an
" inscrutable power," and that both should unite in maintaining the
u insoluble enigma " and the " inscrutable power " as transcending
intuition and beyond imagination. But, if we describe religious truth
according to its real nature, this idea of spiritual truth, as the mere con-
sciousness of an unknown, as a kind of sensation of a sea of nescience
flowing round the island of knowledge, is altogether opposed to its
real character. Spiritual truth is, in fact, as objective and real as
are the phenomena with whose relations science deals. Scripture
revelation, taken as the representation of religious thought at its
best, is so far from transcending experience that it is the record of
spiritual experience, and appeals to it. It is not merely a phase of
thinking that protests against the relative view of things which
science gives us. It nowhere, that I am aware of, professes to tran-
scend the relative. Things out of relation the Bible writers know,
as everybody else knows, are nothings so far as they or we are
concerned. It is only as related that anything can become known,
and this " unknown something " to which science points, although it
may be the highest purification of the scientific process, can yet
never transform itself into the spiritual. It is still the present goal
of scientific effort and inductive generalisation. It is unknown only
so long as science is restrained by the temporary barrier. The great

1

RELIGIOUS IDEAS AND METAPHYSICAL CONCEPTIONS. 269

unknown is partially unveiled whenever any portion of the outlying
darkness is illuminated by the advancing torch of science. I quite
believe that any one genuinely embracing the truths of the Scripture
revelation will likewise hail (or be himself) the pioneer of scien-
tific investigation ; not, however, because he is the guardian of that
supreme verity, the incomprehensible cause, but because anew region
of life has been opened up to him which is profoundly apprehensible
and progress in which he feels to be illimitable. An incomprehensible
cause, as there was occasion to point in an earlier part of this book,
is not a religious conception at all, but a scientific generalisation, and
is not otherwise different from earlier generalisations than in its
being wider and more diffusive in its action. The progress of science,
so far from evolving the religious consciousness and spiritual truth,
has only widened its own prospect and opened new regions of the
same sphere. The nescience which it feels around its science is given,
not by the religious consciousness, but through its own sensations
pressing forward into phenomena as yet inexperienced. This may be
done by the scientific vision enlarged through a kind of scientific
imagination which incites it to new effort.* The definition of truth
that Mr. Spencer himself gives as the accurate correspondence of
subjective to objective relations ought to have secured him against a
representation of religious truth and life as consisting in an acknow-
ledgement of that to which there could be no correspondency, since
there would be no relations to which this life could correspond.
How the religious life could have been so persistent in men if it
consisted in the vague assertion of an ultimate something not in-
creasing in definiteness, but in indefiniteness, ever receding into the
impenetrable and unknown, it is very hard to conceive. The re-
conciliation of Mr. Spencer is a reconciliation produced by the quiet
removal of what is considered one of the irreconcilable elements.
A more effective reconciliation would be the confession of science,
on the one hand, that its facts are only ultimately known as facts of
consciousness through sense experience, and the admission by re-
ligion that its facts are ultimately known in consciousness through
spiritual experience : and the recognition by both that the one class
of facts is not to be explained by the method of the other — that as
our life is not wholly sensible so is it not wholly spiritual — that as

* Every one must see the keenness and vigour of this imaginative power dis-
played by some of our most famous physical philosophers. Modern investigation
may be said to have fostered a new variety of imagination.

270 REASON AND REVELATION.

religion does not include all the facts of tbe world, neither does
science embrace all onr life — that science corresponds to that view
of man which is what has been called the psychological view of
man's mental nature as distinct from the view vaguely called in-
tuitive — that there is a harmony between Scripture revelation, its
objects and methods, and man's nature as a spiritual being which
science is so much inclined to overlook, and which in its occasional
refusal to recognise it has evinced a really unscientific position, not
to speak of its attitude towards the revelation in Scripture, which as
it evolves these spiritual faculties can alone take up the process
that psychological science hands over to it, and carry it to its ulti-
mate issue. From what is called the intuitive school of thinking, on
the other hand, we have had a mixture of both methods and a con-
fusion of revealed truths with scientific truths, which has ended in
almost destroying the landmark between science and religion. This
latter method seems an attempt to bring the higher intuitions under
the law of the understanding merely. One defect, however, must be
acknowledged in the psychological mode of thought ; we mean its
frequent endeavour to account for some purely spiritual principle
entirely on its own method. In this it clearly enough fails, and ought
to have stopped short and recognised the point where the spiritual
world produces the life and thought peculiar to the spiritual nature.
The one sphere will, of course, often blend with the other, but it is
the business of a method that boasts of its analytic process to dis-
solve such compounds, or at least to pronounce them to be complex.
The late Mr. Mansel in the interest of religion tried what Mr.
Spencer attempted in the interest of science. "Against pantheism,
which virtually annihilates causation and escapes the solution of the
problem of the relation between God and His creatures, and posi-
tivism, which holds that the only office of philosophy is to observe
and note the constant relations of phenomena," * he, after Hamilton,
maintains an absolute in philosophy, not however as a problem to be
solved by reason, but as a reality to be believed in, although above
reason. Mr. Mansel was not more content than Mr. Spencer that
religion and philosophy should go on side by side, but was anxious to
reconcile them in his own way. The fact, however, that they do run
side by side and occupy distinct provinces does not, as Mr. Mansel
appeared to imagine, argue opposition. To conclude opposition be-
tween philosophy, or rather science, — for I prefer that name as

* Mansel's " Bampton Lectures."

EELIGIOUS IDEA8 AND METAPHYSICAL CONCEPTIONS. 271

well as the thing it signifies, — and revealed truth, from the bare
fact of difference in the objects of their pursuit, is quite irrelevant.
No normal mode of thought or life that follows its peculiar object is
opposed to any other normal mode, or can be said to need reconcilia-
tion with it. The reconciliation, however, in philosophy which Mr.
Mansel worked out is not at all different from that worked out
by Mr. Spencer, although Mr. Mansel repudiates Spencer's theory,
as being a combination of positivist doctrine with pantheistic as-
sumptions. Yet his quotation from Hamilton's discussions on
this point, and given as his own opinion on the subject, is ex-
pressed in language as nearly equivalent to Mr. Spencer's as two
independent thinkers could state such an opinion. The insolu-
ble enigma of Mr. Spencer is in Hamilton's language this : " that
by a wonderful revelation " (not in our sense or in the usual sense
of that term) " we are in the very consciousness of our inability to
conceive aught above the relative and finite inspired with a belief in
the existence of something unconditioned beyond the sphere of all com-
prehensible reality." The italics are mine. I am unacquainted with
any materialism or positivism that would not subscribe to this
safe "belief." It would perfectly well embody the faith of many a
pantheist so-called. It is quite true that Mr. Mansel, after Hamil-
ton, advanced into this sphere beyond the comprehensible and brought
back from " the void and formless infinite " a series of truths to
array against materialism and positivism that refused to follow them
thither. But such a process is precisely that of the mixed mode of
the intuitive school which has been already noticed. It confounds
what is given in revelation and in sense experience, a proceeding
that tends neither to the improvement of science nor the compre-
hension of revelation. It does not matter in the least in what
manner the doctrine variously called the unconditioned, the abso-
lute, the insoluble enigma, is introduced into philosophy. Whether
it be done as Cousin does by an immediate and intuitive knowledge,
or as Hamilton and Mansel do by belief, or as Mr. Spencer does as
the ultimate verge of thought, — in any case it is a bad psychology
and if it shows anything, certainly shows the barrenness of meta-
physics considered as a science, how utterly without data it is,
how in the sphere of science and philosophy it ignores the first les-
sons of both in basing its conceptions of life, and its reasonings on
vital phenomena, not upon actual observations and experience, but
up on conjectural surmises. It is a cloud pillar with base in the air
and summits out of sight.

272 EEASON AND REVELATION.

It has been said that the stationariness of the ideas with which
metaphysics deals is a proof of their reality ; the stationariness may
be also taken as evidence of the falsity of the methods pursued by
metaphysicians in their attempted analysis of these ideas. The
manner in which certain ideas of this kind can be npheld and pnt
through logical processes with varying results, shows how shadowy
and unreal the ideas are in some instances, in others it shows how
unsuitable are the processes. The fact is, that the leading terms
forming the backbone of metaphysical thought are susceptible of
very various meanings from their disconnection with experience.
They are, as was before said, very often the outcome of imagination,
and every imaginative combination is constantly fluctuating even in
the same mind. For to what does such combination conform but
to the sportive fancy of the man and not to a reality without him ?

It is in some such way as this that Mr. Mansel is enabled to play
fast and loose with the terms absolute and infinite, and to exhibit
through a series of slides, worked certainly on logical not scenic
principles, dissolving views now of the absolute, now of the infinite,
and again of both together. But an effect altogether different might
be produced were any one to take the same liberty with these terms
as Mr. Mansel has done, and which any one is equally entitled to
do. For example, at page 50 of his "Bampton Lectures 1 ' Mr. Mansel
says, the absolute must be accepted by reason as one and simple.
But we should like to ask, why must it be so accepted P If we cannot
know it, how can we say in what manner it must be accepted ? And
what necessity are we under of imagining it with any qualities
that Mr. Mansel may fancy? Mr. Mansel, it would seem, chose
that definition rather than any other which he might have selected,
and which perhaps might have suited the word simply as a word,
in order that he might enjoy the satisfaction of exercising his logic
upon it. Starting with such a representation of the absolute as
that it is unity without attributes, and that it is featureless, it does
not require Mr. Mansel's logic to show that this absolute in relation
to cause, i.e., in becoming cause, annihilates the peculiar unity that
he had ascribed to it, inasmuch as the idea of cause would admit
the conception of an absolute as productive or non-productive.
Any one may reply to this, however, that no person contended for
such a unity except Mr. Mansell, and all that he can do is to knock
down his own mark. There is a confusion of thought which Mr.
Mansel has here fallen into, and of whieh, in a succeeding review of a
reviewer, he maintains that he kept clear. In arguing that the abso-

RELIGIOUS IDEAS AND METAPHYSICAL CONCEPTIONS. 273

Into in becoming a cause either becomes imperfect or more perfect,*
he plainly introduces the idea of perfection into that of the absolute ;
yet we find him at page 154 of his " Philosophy of the Conditioned,"
charging Mr. Mill with misconception of his definition of the abso-
lute as "oat of all relation/' and confounding it with Sir William
Hamilton's, as "involving the idea of perfection." In his process
of demolition, if not in his definition, Mr. Mansel uses both weapons
and is fairly enough open to» criticism from both sides. From the
view of the absolute as the perfect, I cannot see how unity any more
than diversity ought to characterise it. No more can I see how the
perfect in becoming productive should annihilate itself. It may
outwardly express its inherent character, but that is the only serious
consequence which an ordinary mind would anticipate from such an
action. A tree is not the Iobs perfect that it is productive of flower
and fruit. Once having introduced the idea of perfection into the
absolute, he drops it when it suits the form of his argument, as, e.g.,
in the argument based on the condition of consciousness, as a rela-
tion between subject and object. In this argument, while keeping
exclusively to the representation that the absolute is that which is
out of all relation, it is easy to show that this absolute, that is, Mr.
Mansel's temporary and imaginative representation of it, cannot
be given in consciousness, neither can such an absolute be conscious
of anything. But why should he not combine the idea of per-
fection with that of " free from all relation " in this argument, as
well as in the one already noticed ? For no other reason, that I can
see, than that, by his doing so, he would not be able to produce the
same sharp logical contradictory. We are entitled, however, to set
up his own absolute again, even if we are not permitted to imagine
one for ourselves. And having done so, I would ask, What kind of
perfection is it that is possessed by a consciousness which is out of
relation to all consciousnesses ? For our part we should consider
this to be rather the sum of imperfection. For what is the perfec-
tion of consciousness but simply that of being conscious to the
highest degree and to the fullest extent.

Nor is Mr. Mansel more satisfactory in his treatment of the other
metaphysical idea on which he discourses, viz., infinity. It is only
another mark set up within very easy range of the psychological
artillery afterwards brought to bear against it ; a kind of phantom
which he creates, then uncreates. At page 45 of his " Bampton Lec-

* " Bampton Lectures," p. 52.

274 REA80N AND REVELATION.

hires," lie calls it that which is " free from all possible limitation,"
" that which can receive no additional attribute or mode of exist-
ence." Such a field offers strong temptations to any one with half
the lecturer's ability for sporting infinite psychological contradic-
tions in his first Bense of the word. Within this wide domain a
hand less deft than his could play many tricks. But any one who
remembers that this infinite of which mention is here made so
confidently as to its attributes and* their exercise, is also that
which is out of all consciousness, and out of all knowledge, and be-
yond all definition, that which is summed up shortly as beyond the
comprehensible, — any one who remembers all this will not be sur-
prised when told that this infinite when regarded as a person may
be represented as composed of infinite contradictions. To be sure,
it is quite as easy to imagine it in this way as in any other, if it is
to be imagined at all ; and Mr. Mansel is quite free to have his
play of fancy, but he should not forget that it is only fancy moving
with logical apparatus through the " void and formless infinite,"
when he represents every infinite mode of consciousness, at page 51
of his " Bampton Lectures," extending over the field of every other,
and when he draws the conclusion that this common action involves
perpetual antagonism. As for instance, that infinite power can do
all things, and that infinite goodness must, therefore, be able to do
evil ; that infinite justice exacts the utmost penalty, while infinite
mercy pardons the sinner ; that infinite wisdom knows all that is
coming, while infinite freedom is at liberty to do and forbear.

I shall not again touch upon the question of antinomies nor
allude to the criticism that has been made on similar statements
from the side of philosophy, viz., that the term infinite may possibly
be applied to some of these attributes, while others are more fitly
designated as perfect and more figuratively only as infinite ; # but
I would object at the very outset to the representation here made
of the infinite as applied to mental consciousness. No mode of
consciousness, be it finite or infinite, can be intelligibly represented
in the quantitative manner in which Mr. Mansel represents the
modes he names. To figure mental action as an interminable plane
stretching out illimitably over many other planes, that is, many-
other mental actions, is, every one must feel, a picture of mental
states that would not satisfy the pictorial cupidity of a child. To
answer seriously any argument founded on such an imaginative

* Locke : " An Essay concerning Human Understanding.*'

RELIGIOUS IDEAS AND METAPHYSICAL CONCEPTIONS. 275

representation would be quite as ludicrous as to answer an argu-
ment drawn from Milton's representation of the different spheres
of heaven, chaos, earth, and hell, the mere drawing of which upon
a board shows their source and purely imaginative value. Milton's
laboured descriptions of the fields of empyrean light, of the floor
of heaven and of the spirits that fell through it, of the huge form
and the flood, which, every one knows, may serve, if we reduced
them to something like philosophical shape and language, as very
fair examples of the metaphysical representations of Mr. Hansel.
But the latter does what the former had not any occasion to do, or had
poetical taste and philosophical insight to restrain him from doing,
he draws what are meant to be scientific or practical conclusions
from his imaginative creations. After imagining the unimaginable
consciousness of the infinite, it is easy to imagine any amount of
contradictions that would arise from its imaginary qualities. The
contradictions are involved in the very imagination of such an
entity. One can, with the help of the author of " The Limits of Re-
ligious Thought," imagine all these infinites, that he describes in a
kind of mixed metaphor, not now as illimitable planes, but as omni-
potent forces of equal magnitude, acting in opposite directions, only
one does not see with him, that much antagonism would be produced
in such a case. Most people would be inclined to imagine as a re-
sultant of this, a state of stable equilibrium, and in this case many
of the questions started by Mr. Mansel would, if this imagination be
the correct one, never have occurred, since the facta of good and evil,
for example, would never have existed under the condition just de-
scribed. I shall not follow him in his application of the conditions
of consciousness to this second product of the metaphysical imagina-
tion. He may well grant that he has, in his own language, de-
stroyed the (his) conception of the absolute and infinite; but we
cannot say that his impotency logically to support this conception
" leads us to believe in the existence of the Infinite which we can-
not conceive, because denial involves a contradiction no less than
assertion of its conceivability."* On the contrary, I am inclined to
think that the greater contradiction is the rejection of the con-
ception on the grounds he has disputed, and its acceptation on the
basis of what he calls belief. For after all is said, it is only a
belief, not in a conception, using this term in its proper logical
meaning, but in an imagination ; and if we believed all that we

* " Bampton Lectures," p. 95.

t 2

276 SEASON AND REVELATION.

could imagine, we would have an infinite, or to speak more correctly
an indefinite number of infinites. Bacon wished in his day for some
Divine dialectic or treatise on the limits and uses of reason in spiritual
things. Mr. Mansel proposed to himself to supply this long stand-
ing want, but his work is virtually only a kind of dialectic of imagina-
tion, or the limits and uses of the reason in metaphysics. We are
fully convinced that, like Mr. Spencer, he has never touched the
subject-matter proper of spiritual truth, especially spiritual truth
as exhibited in the contents of Scripture revelation, which is his cri-
terion of this form of truth as it is mine. Revelation is very far
from being concerned with metaphysical conceptions at all, either
of the Divine or anything else, and it is very far from requiring it
as our duty, as is asserted in the Lectures (p. 189), to think God
personal and believe Him infinite, in the sense in which these terms
are held by the lecturer. Scripture has as little to do with meta-
physics as with physics. It is this erroneous idea that leads the
lecturer to that ultimate development of his principle, of the two
ways in which we can contemplate God, viz., either to transcend
the conditions of human thought, and expand the human con-
sciousness to the infinitude of its object, which is a speculative
knowledge of God, and the result of such transcendentalism he him-
self has shown to be a tissue of self-contradictions ; or to keep within
proper limits, and view the object of thought in a manner accom-
modated to human capacities, which is a regulative knowledge of
God by a positive method.

In partial agreement with this latter method, I grant that all
our knowledge, whether of spiritual or physical truth, must be
confined to those views of it that are coincident with our nature ;
but I should prefer saying, that our nature in either sphere is
coincident with the truth to be acquired or capable of becoming so.
There seems no satisfactory reason, so far as I have seen, why the
truth should always be represented as mangled to suit our incapa-
city. By asserting this, we are not to be held as maintaining, what
is manifestly not true, that we are at present capable of perceiving
all truth. All that is contended for is, that we have the faculties,
which, by natural growth under proper conditions, will each in
their own sphere become capable of a wider and fuller perception of
those things which are now but faintly perceived ; that even with
respect to the sum of all perceptions, the spiritual perception of the
Highest, as there is a possibility of becoming perfect like God, there
is the possibility involved in that perfection of fully knowing God.

f

RELIGIOUS IDEAS AND METAPHTSIGAL CONCEPTIONS. 277

It always appears to me that the whole question of adaptation
of truth to the faculties of man — to what are called by logicians
and psychologists the forms and laws of thought, is from beginning
to end full of great error. The true way is more likely to be, that
our faculties are fitted by their proper exercise for the perception of
what is spiritual or natural. This seems the proper ground to take,
being, as it is, confirmed by much of our individual experience, as
any man of deep spiritual mind can testify, and as advancing
physical theories are daily tending to establish. What we know
in our lowest condition of capacity, we may know quite truly : the
world of the jelly fish is as true to it as a man's world is to him ;
the world of a pagan is no more a bundle of accommodated rela-
tions than is the expanded Christian world. If it be said, as is
often the case, that we ljave truth through a disqualifying medium,
there is a foreclosing of all profitable discussion. If our faculties
be not adapted for the discernment of truth, whatever be its form,
then, of course, the matter ends there, and we need not be over
anxious to know anything further. We can guide ourselves in the
spiritual sphere, as some would have us do in the natural, in the
fashion of Pyrrhonists, sceptical of all truth, yet practically careful
of our ways. But if, as most people confidently feel, man has capa-
cities for knowing things natural as well as things Divine (although
by different methods), then we need not entertain any anxiety about
what is somewhat erroneously called accommodation in their com-
munication. The accommodation cannot in such a case be suspected
as a method of palming instruction upon errant faculties, which is a
usual mode of speaking of it, but as a wise tempering or explanation
of truth which may at first appear new and strange, presented, how-
ever, to faculties capable of receiving and understanding it in a
degree of extent and not in that of correctness. From the first
accommodation (to keep that name) to the last, it is truth and no
lie. The accommodation from our present point of view need not
alter the true to the false, while it explains it, for this would be an
absolute contradiction. A child's picture of a horse, and the name
" horse," convey at different stages of mental development, not dif-
erent ideas — varying truths, such as regulative and speculative, but
one and the same truth or fact. And the principle now laid down
is one of wide application, not only to physical truth, but to the
point, so much disputed, of a gradual revelation whose initial stage,
and far beyond, was a sort of pictorial representation. This prin-
ciple with its application, although explaining many apparent diffi-

278 SEASON AND REVELATION.

culties in the spiritual revelation itself, such as its incompleteness
from our present standpoint, and difficulties also in the admixtures
of opinions which from first to last it contains, and which I have
summed up elsewhere under the name of provincialisms, cannot
be fully entered into here.

While granting, therefore, that knowledge and faculty must be
coincident, I imagine that Mr. Mansel would not, in the natural
sphere, have maintained that physical knowledge is regulative, simply
from the fact of its being related to us, as we know all knowledge
must be in every sphere of truth. Because we may transcend the
sphere of the natural we do not, therefore, transcend the conditions
of all knowing. But to make these conditions limitations, as Mr.
Mansel does, reveals a singular misapprehension of the meaning
and nature of conditions. The conditions under which we live are
the whole circumstances that minister to our vitality, not the circum-
stances that destroy vital action. A tree is not limited by its con-
ditions ; but expands under them. The fact of a revelation, which
Mr. Mansel never doubts, shows that the Being who revealed Him-
self in the manner therein mentioned, is capable of making Himself
known to man. He is not reduced to the puzzling contradictions
supposed to be necessary in such an unveiling. The perfection of
Being, we should imagine, is not, as our author seems to think, to
exist in complete exclusiveness, but in more profound and intimate
and universal relations. Being, in Mr. Mansel's highest conception
of it, looks very like something non-intelligible, if it is not a non-
entity. Being in relations is, however, in different words, Being in-
telligible. Reason can never enjoin it as a duty " to believe that
which we cannot comprehend." * The God of all genuine spiritual
revelation is "the living God" of the psalmist, who "at sundry
times and in divers manners " revealed Himself. By overlooking
this, and fixing attention on a Being out of relation, all the supposed
logical difficulties have arisen and the conclusion has been drawn
that God is incomprehensible, or at least, that only a regulative
knowledge of God is to be gained by man.

One in whom some attributes are, to us in our language, infinite,
is one whose* relations to us through these attributes may be multi-
plied infinitely, and contemplated as inexhaustible. He is one
infinitely related, that is, in an infinite degree. Instead of one out
of our finite existence and inhabiting an irrelative sphere, he is one

* " Bampton Lectures," p. 96.

EELIGIOUS IDBAS AND METAPHYSICAL CONCEPTIONS. 279

filling to overflowing the human sphere — one in whom we live and
move and have our being. The infinite, if the word be used to speak
of the Divine nature, is precisely the same infinite that we think
of in connection with number or space ; and no one ever says that
we do not know number or space, because our conception of their
infinity is somewhat vague. I have little inclination in the present
connection to enter upon the discussion of this idea ; but I am deeply
impressed with the belief that much of the confusion attending it
might have been avoided by a more careful consideration of its
origin. Infinity is the expression of hope, in a backward or for-
ward look, in relation to certain experiences ; the sign for the pos-
sibility of something unattained ; the mark that we have not yet set
our boundary to something, not, however, a confession that we never
will. In this sense it may be taken as an empirical conclusion sub-
ject to revision. The infinite applied to any positive experience means
that the series is unclosed ; that there will be gathering experiences.
If we suppose the series concluded in any subject, e.g., in number,
however great it may be, the infinite vanishes. The fundamental
idea in the infinite is progression. It is often asked, and Mr. Man-
sel asks, and answers the question, Have we a positive idea of the
infinite ? He however, labours under a radical defect in the state-
ment of his argument. He starts from the conception of an infinite
something, which is, in plain terms, a contradiction ; for everything
by its conception is, in the very act of conceiving it, rendered
finite. Something finite is something of which the series is con-
cluded, to whose progression we set a boundary. Thus what iB
fundamental in the infinite is destroyed. Infinity is only possible in
a flux, and implies a moving series. The term positive, applied to
such a growing idea as this looks somewhat equivocal, and mainly
so from the negative form in which it is usually expressed. There
is a positive enough sense in infinity when we conceive it as con-
tinuity, which is the essential thought in infinity. Names are too
apt to dominate our opinions, and the infinite is an instance of such
a dominance. Expressed as continuity or progression the negative
form vanishes, and infinity becomes quite as positive a thought as
uniformity of nature, for example. This uniformity simply means
that we have not had an experience that contradicts a universal re-
gularity in natural occurrences ; even as infinity or continuity means
that our experience does not contradict progression in some special
instances.

There is another remark which should be made in connection with

280 EEASON AND &EVKLATION.

the question of the infinite. It is often reasoned, and Mr. Mansel's
most destructive criticism is based upon such reasoning, that the
infinite applied to an object renders such object incomprehensible.
This is quite contrary to the nature and origin of the idea of infinity
which arises in our minds by the addition of finites of precisely the
same kind. Infinity never alters the nature of anything or any per-
son, for by such alteration the infinite would be terminated and a
new series begun. The infinity of space rests upon the experience of
men finding no bounds to repeated ideas of extension of the same
nature. There must, however, be entire homogeneity in the added
ideas. We know that the conception of any given finite space and
the infinity of space refer to one and the same space — the ideas differ
only in extent. The infinity lies in the added sameness of a con-
tinuous series ; and incomprehensibility, if there be such, can only
be of the quantity not the quality, of the idea. If the idea be clear
as a finite idea, infinity does not render it any more obscure; if
there be any difference by its repetition to infinity it will gain in
distinctness. Time finite is the same as time raised to infinity. The
infinite, if it were heterogeneous, could not, in the algebraic symbol,
return upon itself, thus 00. It is only by an entire and absolute
homogeneity that it can do so.

In like manner, if we actually or metaphorically apply the infinite
to the attributes of God, we do not in the smallest degree alter the
nature of these attributes conceived as finite. If infinity be applied
to the power of God for instance, the power in God is not altered
from power in man by its continuity in an endless series. Nor is
this so from the mere fact that we could not speak intelligently if
it were different, and that if the ideas were different different names
would be necessary ; but it is so from the fact of its being infinite.
If the conception we have of the idea of power in its finite form be
changed in the progressive series, the series is broken by such
change, and the infinite vanishes. The conception of power with
which we started has terminated, and the new infinite with which we
begin is an infinite unintelligibility. Before power can be raised to
infinity, it is necessary that there be a continuity of the same kind of
power. And so is it with other attributes. The infinite mercy of God
is the simple idea of finite mercy repeated without end. The fact that
there are classes of conceptions, to which such an idea as that of in-
finity is inapplicable, will be found to lie in the other fact, that these
classes of conceptions are incapable of repetition in their simplicity.
The very conception of infinity, as applied to any idea, is prima facie

BELIGI0U8 IDEAS AND METAPHYSICAL CONCEPTIONS. 281

evidence that this idea is in itself simple and comprehensible. The
bare continuity implied in infinity is a continuity of absolute same-
ness. Infinity is based on number, — the most simple of all ideas, so
far as homogeneity is concerned ; and as the infinity of number is a
repetition of units in an endless series, of which every unit is pre-
cisely similar to every other, so the infinity of a virtue, or of any
attribute, is a repetition of units, so to speak, of which the first in the
series is like to each succeeding addition, and, if the series were com-
pleted, of the same nature throughout.

Viewed in this manner, the knowledge of God is not removed
from us by its infinity, but brought more determinately within our
vision ; infinity being, as applied to the idea of God, another name
for simplicity, or, as we have it in the Bible, unchangeableness.
Infinity in the Divine is simply continued unchangeableness. What
we know of Him and His love and justice, or other attributes, is
no mere regulative knowledge that may one day be dissipated as
the veriest ignorance, but is a sure basis for a progression in the
knowledge that Paul speaks of in the expression, knowing as we are
known. The knowledge in par 6 is like in nature to the whole that
is afterwards to be revealed. The infinity lies more in the fulness
and variety of manifestation of the character of God as already
known, than in incomprehensible contradictions behind this know-
ledge. If it be otherwise, infinity does not describe it. The in-
finity of space is the space that we already know, infinitely expanded.
The infinity of Divine mercy is the exercise of a mercy we already
know infinitely multiplied, not indefinitely transformed into some-
thing we do not know. Mr. Mansel's regulative knowledge is in
the last resort the nescience of Mr. Spencer, and both are, however
applicable to metaphysical thought, totally inapplicable to spiritual
truth.

One of the most singular things in thought is the manner in
which metaphysics runs away with a man in argument. It may
be imagined that the tendency is not so strong now as it has been,
but it is still powerful enough in theological or religious subjects
to require some notice. The nullity of result in many such cases,
which was formerly so evident in dissertations like those that
treated of the eternal nature of truth, may still be observed. Start-
ing from an assertion that there is a common and allowed distinc-
tion between necessary and contingent truths, we have all seen the
highest air-castles erected. And this is done simply by maintaining
at the outset that the sort of truths called necessary have such and

282 SEASON AND REVELATION.

such attributes inherently and essentially, and beside all proof,
merely because no attempt is made to reduce them to fact, whence
the correctness or absurdity of these statements would be manifest.
Instead of this, what is done ? One attribute after another is added
to the creation. Begun in imagination, the structure advances under
the same mastery. These necessary and eternal truths are to imagina-
tion clearly relations between ideas themselves, since they regard the
essence of things, and are not in reru/m natura. But it follows that
they must be Divine ; for necessary and eternal truths being neces-
sary and eternal relations, it is impossible that the relations should
be more necessary and eternal than the subject of them, that is, the
ideas ; for unless these ideas be necessary and eternal, how can the
relations be so P But what is necessary and eternal but the Divine ?
Therefore they are relations between Divine ideas, as the Divine is
the only stable substance that can sustain these immutable relations.
And were it not for these Divine ideas, there would be no eternal
essence to supply necessary and eternal relations, nor would there be
necessary truths, and consequently no science, which can only be of
necessary truths. And in this way we have a proof given us, in the
course of a subsidiary argument, that there must necessarily be a
God, as the inmost ground and central support of the whole intel-
lectual world.

I give this as a fair specimen at any time of a metaphysical argu-
ment and of its outcome. It may not always run in precisely the
same groove. The state of science will hardly permit this; for
science has demonstrated clearly enough, that it needs no such postu-
late as necessary truth, or a God even, to make itself possible, — nay,
that science is only in strictness possible, by eliminating these m
scientific inquiry; that the physios of an inquirer like Democritus,
who had no supposition of a mind in nature, works better than the
physics of a Plato with an admixture of metaphysics. I am quite
aware that this may be denied ; but it may stand as correct until a
metaphysician or — what is much the same as things are — a theo-
logian has shown any one branch of science to have been forwarded,
in any age of the world, by metaphysical positions. And if the meta-
physical mode of approaching subjects known to us, and within the
range of scientific investigation, leads to conclusions so illusory and
unprofitable, it is a fair inference that in what lies outside science,
its basis being no whit truer, its results cannot be any more certain
and useful. Arguing with symbols and equations, that stand for
nothing that we know of, we may effect any result we desire. Tak-

RELIGIOUS IDEAS AND METAPHYSICAL CONCEPTIONS. 283

ing our start, for example, from the point that the metaphysicians
have brought ns to, truth itself must be the same with the real
essence and substance of the Divine nature; for whatever exists
is either God or effect of God, and so it is with necessary truth.
But necessary truth is not an effect of God, and, according to the
hypothesis, must therefore be God : for if it is the effect of God, it
would not be necessary, which is against the supposition ; or if it
be the effect of God and necessary, then, as every necessary effect
must have a necessary cause, nothing being in the cause given that
is not in the antecedent or combination of antecedents, there must
have been a cause necessarily determined to act — that is, a necessary
agent, which is also an unintelligent agent. And if truth be the
effect of God, as a necessary agent, then, antecedently to this effect,
there was no truth or knowledge, because nothing known, since
God in producing truth acted quite in the dark, or without intelli-
gence. The same will apply to design. Antecedent to a present
order and design there was neither, since God, acting necessarily,
acted without order and without design. Moreover, it would also
follow, if we give ourselves rein enough, that the perfection of the
Divine nature was dependent on something else that necessarily de-
termined it to act. In like manner, we might go on constructing
a world of ideas in relation to beings and existences, which we had
no means of verifying. And this is the root error of all meta-
physical and theologico-metaphysical thought: that its subject-
matter transcends experience, that its method is arbitrary, and its
conclusions futile. The description of the Schoolmen respecting the
number of angels that could dance upon the point of a needle is as
capable of verification in result, and as pertinent to our life as is
much of the metaphysics of the present day. The phase of thought
is the same now as then, the symbolic forms only, with which it
works, being altered a little. Its effects now are precisely similar to
what history tells us of its former effects. It provokes controversy
without supplying the means of allaying it ; it impedes legitimate
scientific thought and religious knowledge ; it confounds real know-
ledge and individual fancy, and produces the oppositions of science
falsely so-called, and is in the main wholly unfruitful. Science can-
not be developed through metaphysics ; in fact, as we have seen, its
ideas are confessed to be stationary, while science is progressive.
Neither can religious knowledge or spiritual truth be discovered
from a metaphysical point of view. There is a scientific method,
and there is a method in Divine knowledge, and the metaphysical

284 SEASON AND REVELATION.

method is outside both. In the possession of a Divine life only can
we know spiritual or Divine truth. The reconciliation of this truth
with philosophy, which has been noticed, errs in supposing that the
latter contains the former. And just as in earlier times Augustine
erred in thinking that he had found the reconciliation of religion
and philosophy by Platonising the gospel of Christianity, so Mr.
Spencer errs in imagining that he has found this reconciliation by
Christianising metaphysics, and Mr. Mansel by the reverse process
of finding metaphysics in Christianity.

r

CHAPTER XVII.

CHRISTIANITY AND MORALITY AS ETHICAL IDEALS AND

SOCIAL FORCES.

" If any man be in Christ he is a new creature."

The relation between Christianity and morality, either in the in-
dividual or in society, is as yet very ill defined. It is disputed
whether there be any distinction between the principles of Christ's
kingdom and the moral principles which we are usually supposed
to derive from experience. On the one hand, there is said to be
something altogether new in Christ's teaching ; and, on the other,
that these supposed new principles were neither brought by Him
into the world, nor will they disappear with Him out of it. Opinions
differ, too, in regard to the quality of the principles of Christianity.
" How wide as the heavens is the ancient conception of virtue from
the Christian," says Lange in his " Oeschichte des^Materialismus;"
and John Stuart Mill went bo far as to say that the abstract standard
of morals might be at all times replaced by the concrete one, What
would Christ have thought ? while Strauss sees in Christianity a
veritable cultus of poverty and beggary, and quotes against it, with
the fullest approval, Buckle's well known description of the gospel
of industry and trade. I am not altogether persuaded that either of
these opposed views is based upon a correct conception of Christ and
the Christian religion and its truths. If the idea of Christianity, on
which the men now mentioned and those who think with them pro-
ceed, is not altogether false, their explanation of Christian principles
is an outside and superficial one. They fail to seize the peculiarities
of the system which they seek to explain. To represent, as they
generally do, the revelation through Christ — for it is better to take
this as representative of the religious idea — as a code of morals,
is scarcely less erroneous than to represent it, as some have done, as
a system of theology, or a valuable quarry for such a system.
There are two preliminary objections to such a view of Christian-
ity besides the objection to be drawn from a view of its nature as a
whole. It goes against the opinion of its founder ; and, regarded in
the light of amoral system merely, it will break down in its declared

286 REASON AND REVELATION.

purpose with the individual and the race as a new and renovating
spiritual force in the world. It can, I think, be made evident, that
it is necessary to distinguish Christianity not merely from theology,
but from morality, if we are to have a rational understanding of it,
or feel its influence in our lives.

Except by some who have pursued a line of attack on Christianity
in a way that the majority of calmly thinking men must regard as at
least indiscriminate, the estimate of the ideal in the teaching of
Jesus is, by those who have given the subject their honest considera-
tion, a very high one. It may be considered by many that the
Christian religion is honoured in being thus regarded. But it is
plain that Christianity would neither be honourable nor estimable
were it not moral and in harmony, too, with what is highest in our
moral nature and perceptions of the right and true.* But it is more
than this. The distinctiveness of its truths does not lie in their
being moral, but in their being spiritual. As has been partly seen,
they are for spiritual beings, and imply a spiritual life in man and
not simply a moral nature. I shall not dwell here upon the division
of man's nature into organic, intellectual, moral, and spiritual, with
their correspondent affections. The sciences have made us familiar
with the first three members of the group, and our present inquiry
has familiarised us by this time with the last. What I wish at pre-
sent to call attention to, is the complexity in the life of man. Each
part of this complex whole has, so to speak, a mode of existence
peculiar to itself. It is true that we can only see these modes in
combination, yet we know that there are separate functions, special
work, and special laws for each. When a man, for instance, has ac-
quired intelligence, no matter how it is acquired, for it is not with
the origin but with the existence of things that we have at present
to do, it means an acquisition of faculties and energies that go out
in directions widely different from those of his merely physical and
organic powers. He has a new sphere of being. If moral feelings
are acquired, they are so acquired through conditions that we must
describe in other terms than those of intellect and sense. The
sphere is that of beings like himself, and the conditions are a con-
formation of actions with certain well known and understood laws,
as we say.

* There is, however, it should be observed, a moral element in other questions
besides that of spiritual truths, and which yet are in themselves distinguished
from ethical conceptions strictly considered. There is a morality of intellect
and esthetic taste. The outcome of neither is estimable when it outrages the
moral sensibility.

CHRISTIANITY AND MORALITY. 287

The same thing holds of the highest member of the complex exist-
ence, the spiritual.

The relative position of each member of this complex existence
is a matter of some importance. The fact that we have spiritual
faculties does not carry with it any call to neglect the other elements
of our life ; no more than the fact that we have a physical life should
obscure the fact that we have spiritual faculties. Extreme principles
of living, based on the exclusion of one or more of the elements
of our life, have been frequently tried. But between the principle,
" Let us eat and drink," of physical, and the extreme of spiritual,
exclusiveness, that has sometimes in the form of asceticism run coun-
ter to what are often reckoned the instinctive feelings of morality,
in overlooking the obligations of filial and conjugal affection, there
is not much to choose. There can be little question that the highest
life for man is that mode of it which, through its successive stages
in growth and development, gathers up and carrieB forward all its
other forms of life, and whose ultimate character is united by an
inseparable bond with its first. He is the true type of man who
is a physical, intelligent, moral, and spiritual being. But, while
neglect of one or more elements of our complex life must be fatal to
any true growth in a man, we shall find that the interrelation of
these parts brings with it a necessary subordination of one part to
another. Where it appears — for I do not say the case will arise
— that a physical, intellectual, or moral principle would be detri-
mental to spiritual life, the law of the highest would be the rule for
all.

It is the confusion of the spiritual with the moral that I have
to complain of in some thinkers on the question now under re-
view. Such men come to the Scripture revelation, and see in its
contents purely moral elements. They suppose that the kingdom
of God there spoken of, and unveiled, is a great moral kingdom, a
system differing from others that are known to us, if it does differ
at all from them, only in the type of its grandeur and beauty.
Fichte comes within view of another conception of this kingdom,
and nearer the reality of it as pourtrayed by Christ. The revelation
of the kingdom of God is, for him, the essence of Christianity, and
that kingdom is the kingdom of freedom, which is gained through
the sinking of one's own will in God's will. The doctrine of the
kingdom of heaven is, in truth, according to him, the principle of a
new world-government. I shall have occasion to notice later on,
how such a position would naturally bring Fichte, as it actually did,

288 REASON AND REVELATION.

to another position in relation to social questions, which is also at one
with Christianity, viz., that of unselfishness as against the maxim
of self interest in trade and political economy.

The kingdom of Christ must be approached in Fichte's manner
or in some similar way. Instead of this, however, it is approached,
as I said, from the ontside. What may be called the men of the
Nicodemns type, men of thonghtf nl minds, of honest purpose, of pure
intentions, with a kindly leaning towards Christ and the Christian
religion, have dealt with it more from the moral standpoint. They
would desire nothing more than to see the system gain power and
influence in society, perhaps under some modifications. Noble and
virtuous themselves, as they could hardly fail to be, having the dis-
positions they have, and living under the influence, however indirect,
of Christian truth and Christ's example, they cannot escape perceiv-
ing that there is something singularly lofty in the New Testament
teaching, something, to say the least, unusual in the life and actions
of Jesus, and the idea on which His life was grounded, something
unsurpassed in the previous history of man, something only to be
approximately reached by mankind in the future. And while Beeing
all this, and being the men they are, they conclude that there is
realised in Christ, for once in human history, the highest excellence
of which the highest minds have dreamed in the purest moments of
their inspiration. The life and teaching of Jesus has produced, and
is fast producing, especially in thoughtful religious minds, some
such convictions as I have now mentioned. The men who have
adopted these opinions with regard to Christianity and its founder,
think in this way to explain the position of Christ in history. As
Christ would put it, they expect in this way to see His kingdom
and to enter it. It is with reference to such an attitude of mind
that Christ said, " Ye must be born again." I believe that it is on
this statement that we must take our stand, if our view of the new
kingdom, as given in the contents of Scripture, is to be a correct one.

The truths and principles of the new kingdom are not strictly the
outcome of the natural course of the onward march of thought and
experience on moral subjects. Christianity is not merely a great
reformation of the moral life of man, any more than it is a new era
in the philosophy of religion. In looking at it in these latter as-
pects we lose sight of the peculiar feature of Christianity, whether
we call this with Fichte " Weltverfassung," or something else.
There is a great deal said in this connection, as I incidentally no-
ticed before, about the similarity between pagan moral thought and

CHRISTIANITY AND MORALITY. 289

the moral contents of the Bible. In particular, the great Personality
of the New Testament is considered by some to have merely enun-
ciated moral truths which were more or less widely known before
His advent. The love of onr neighbour, we are told, was an injunc-
tion of the Jewish law, and had been taught by Rabbi Hillel some
time before Christ came. Love to onr enemies was in the time of
Christ a fundamental principle of the Stoics ; and after His time, but
still independent of Him, Epictetus had called all men his brothers.
That, in fact, as it was the special circumstances, political and social,
in Judaea, which gave birth to these and other virtues, so the like
circumstances occurring elsewhere produced similar results. I
make little of the reply that has been again and again made to
representations like this, viz., that the moral truths mentioned above,
and others besides, were by Christ combined, whereas in pagan
thought they appear as coruscations merely and happy guesses.
That may be partly true, although the very people who urge this
would be the first to declare that there is an entire absence of
system and combination in the New Testament teaching. But, even
supposing that there was less coherence in pagan moral thought than
in the Christian teaching, the true distinction between Christianity
and it does not lie in this direction. A better expression of the pecu-
liarity of Christ's appearance is to be found in the words of Simeon :
"He is set . . . that the thoughts of many hearts may be
revealed." Their thoughts, not of the external world but of the
spiritual.

The appearance of Jesus was equivalent to a new element intro-
duced into life, a new element as compared with the moral ; for
spiritual truths and ideas had, as we have already seen, been opera-
tive among His countrymen long before His appearance. A com-
parison, therefore, of what may be called Christian sentiments with
pagan sentiments does not bring us to the heart of the subject. If
the nobler sentiments were here and there expressed, the met of
their being so does not tell against Christianity, looked at on its
moral side, it adds to its naturalness rather, and confirms, what the
objectors to whom I refer are anxious to deny, its suitability to
man as a social being. The comparison, however, shows that some-
thing more than good sentiments is needed for humanity. The
best sentiments in the world can do very little for the world. It is
quite possible for bad men and bad times to have in their possession
most unexceptionable sentiments. It was not so much what Christ
said about man as what He did for him that constitutes the great

u

290 REASON AND REVELATION.

distinction between Him and others. His standpoint was an alto-
gether new one ; and it was because He was the Son of man, the
typical man, as the New Testament has it, the firstborn of the
coming time, exhibiting the true manhood of our race in life and
action, and in death and suffering, that He became not the teacher
simply of religious or moral philosophy, but the source of a new
life and power to mankind. He was the founder of a new kingdom.
His words here and there may die away and be forgotten. It
is quite certain that we have merely the barest record of these words :
but that is a matter of secondary moment. The personality of the
man can never be a thing of the past. His spirit has entered into
history and become one of the forces of society. The principles of
His kingdom have worked their way effectually into the life of man-
kind, and are at this moment operative in many directions. In the
words of Paul, " Yea, though we have known Christ after the flesh,
yet now henceforth know we Him no more." His life in the flesh
has been transmuted into spiritual energy for man. What He lived
for, and how He lived, are the main things for us. Not to admire
His sentiments, but to have Him in us. As He Himself strongly puts
it, to be filled with His life and spirit and idea, and thus through the
living Christ spiritually to be made alive, is what Christ aims at.

It has been said that Epictetus recognised the fatherhood of God
and consequently the brotherhood of man ; but was it in any vital
sense, like the sonship of Christ making us also sons of God ? I
have said the simple teaching of morality would not make men
better, — moral teaching, as a rule, being misapprehended as to its
effects. It is largely scientific in its nature, and only partially prac-
tical. But even were the New Testament teaching to be regarded
as a practical inculcation of moral truths, consider what position
Christ would have occupied to-day had He been a master in the ex-
position and enforcement of ethical thought. The number of men
who read the old masters, Socratic and others, is small ; nor can
any one reasonably imagine that the number which would have read
the Jewish teacher, had Christ been simply such, would have been
larger. I do not know, that, as it is, He is read with the thorough-
ness that many seem to take for granted. But, above all reading of
fine thoughts has been the new life and purpose brought by Him to
man, His vivifying spiritual power. In attempting to describe this
speciality of Christ and Christianity, I shall not be able to keep clear
of the second division of the question of the divergence of Christ
and His new kingdom from moral teachers and systems, viz., in the

CHRISTIANITY AND MORALITY. 291

fundamental principle or idea of that kingdom. Bat I shall only
make rise of this in so far as it helps to a clear delineation of the
subject now under discussion.

Theodore Parker says, in contrasting the moral man with the
religions man, that the former obeys from love of duty, the latter
because any certain law is the will of God. It is the religious many
at least the ideal religious man, that obeys from love, and the moral
man because he must, being under law. The religious man gains
this motive through the power of Christ's spirit, called in the New
Testament the might of Him that loved us ; or through the new
birth, as this transforming power of Christ on a man is sometimes
called. When this new power enters a man's spirit, it is a simple
matter of necessity that a new spiritual creation within comes with
it, or a new creature, as Paul terms it. It is, if we believe the ex-
periences of spiritual men, as much, a matter of certainty as that
2 + 2 = 4. Paul had no doubt about it when speaking on this sub-
ject from his own experience. We know from the history of the man
and his after labours that he was giving expression to the soberest
truth of his religious life, when he thus described the effect of Christ's
spirit upon himself. The alteration is not one here and there in his
thoughts and feelings on given matters ; it is a complete new way
of looking at things. The result of this transformation goes to show
the truth of what I have already said, that Christ was not the pro-
pounder merely of one, or two, or more admirable moral principles.
He came to substitute one form of living for another ; to supersede
and supplant, not to prune and trim ; to make men look out on the
world and God and their fellow-men with different eyes to what
they had hitherto done ; to give them eyes, in fact, for the light of
heaven ; to give them ears for the voice of God. It is, thus, a new
beginning of life that men receive through Jesus. The past must
be cut away, as it were, from under our feet. Christ's spirit has
no footing there, and if we are in Him we can find no ground there
either. His purpose was to upset the past, to overturn what we call
our plan of life, to begin a new future for us, to start us on a new
road. Christianity, regarded on the moral side, is revolutionary and
at the same time constructive. The process in forming men anew
is a double one, there is an undoing and building up, — old things,
in Bible language, are passed away ; here clear space is made for
the future, when all things become new. It is a veritable transla-
tion for a man morally when he comes under the influence of the
spirit of Jesus. He thereby enters into a new order of facts and

u 2

292 SEASON AND REVELATION.

truths. All this is very different from listening to Christ the teacher
of moral maxims which were before current in the world, or even
which He brought for the first time into the world. It is a complete
new reading of the world that He brings ; and any one who takes
Him as a teacher of ethics from whose lessons one can pick and choose,
at whose Divine flame one can warm one's own love a little, from
whose light one can borrow some rays, is overlooking the fact that
Jesus is a spiritual Creator, as we say, the Saviour, the renovator,
and restorer in moral, and spiritual, and social life. He is not como
to make better men and women of us, morally, but to make us, to
all intents and purposes, new men and women. He did not come
to say the best and newest things about God, to frame definitions
on that matter, however accurate and satisfactory to contemporary
thought, or to answer vague questions about God. No more did He
occupy a like position in morals. He came that He might revolu-
tionise our idea of life, that from the root of our moral and spiritual
being we might be new-made, that we might be completely swung
round, as it were, from former views, and plans of ordering our life.
It is matter of experience that morality is a somewhat different
thing from all this. In moral life and development, there is nothing
like an uprooting and supplanting. A moral man in moral improve-
ment does not lose, what I may call, the consecutiveness of his moral
nature, and the same thing is true of social life. It requires some
vivifying spirit to descend upon the individual, or the mass, in order
to produce anything like what I have described as taking place in
spiritual and moral life, through spiritual means. Morality when
left outside Christian influences, while attaining considerable rich-
ness and beauty, has had its real advancement, I doubt not, very
much exaggerated. From its root and germinating source it is de-
prived of the regenerating and healing energies of the spiritual life.
I know it is proposed to supplement the native weakness of the moral
power and its limited view of life and duty by an elevation of the
feelings above the actual, by the creation of a " home of spirits/*
which shall be instead of the common religious belief, thus obeying
Schiller's injunction,

" Fliehet aus dem engen, dumpfen Leben
In dee Ideales Reich."

This is specially felt to be needed in the public and social life of
the present day ; a supplementing of the moral by the aesthetic and
ideal. It is at least a confession that the moral in itself has not

CHRISTIANITY AND MORALITY. 293

spring enough to lift society out of any groove and impart new
impulses and widened vision to it. Whether it can be done on the
principle of " Wage du zu irren und zu traumen," remains to be
proved ; that it has been done on the Christian principle has been
proved to some extent during the last 1800 years. It is a simple
matter of experience in the moral life of individuals, that a breaking
with the past, on moral grounds alone, is as hard a matter as it is to
do the same in social life. Physiological psychology can give abun-
dant reasons why organised feelings, thoughts, and acts should
fetter a man morally, more hopelessly than iron rivets can his body.
Defeated moral power in the individual fills a larger space in the
world's history, than, I believe, men are aware of, unless perhaps some
medical men. The biography of many a man or woman is a record
of the impotency of morality as a new forming force in turning the
currents of life. External restraint may prevent indulgence by the
withdrawal of the objects that lead to it, but the excitations may
exist although the object does not meet the sensitivity, and morality, as
we now recognise it, does not lie merely in the overt act, but equally
in the internal state. This is a question that those who have to
deal with the masses in our communities are constantly called upon
to consider. It may be said by some, as Socrates says, that this is
the result of ignorance choosing the nearer for the more remote, and
that with the masses a wider knowledge will effect the needed change.
For a certain position in moral progress it is ignorance, but that is
not the entire explanation. There are those who know the right
and do it not. In fact, it may be said that moBt men know, that
is, intellectually perceive, the right and the wrong, but all have not
equal power to act on their perceptions. Knowledge is an element
in morality, but in supplying impulses it is one of many elements,
and weaker in the majority of men than the combination of other
forces which go to the determination of an action. These forces
when well organised, as they most frequently are, may act without
the sphere of knowledge altogether, by what is known as a reflex
movement, and even when only partially organised they may, from
their great stimulative power and superior volume, neutralise the
opposing force of knowledge or perception.

There is felt, therefore, to be something needed to lift mankind
out of what is termed an ethical materialism. The effort to intro-
duce an ideal element into life is one of many efforts that have been
made to elevate moral life. The theory of Gomte and others, al-
though starting from an apparently different principle, is in the same

294 SEASON AND REVELATION.

direction. Mr. Mill, after Comte, thinks that the desire to be in
unity with our fellow-creatures may have in morals both the psy-
chical power and the social efficacy of a religion. The formula of
Strauss, " Alles sittliche Handeln des Menschen, mochte ich sagen,
ist ein Sichbestimmen des Einzelnen naoh der Idee der Gattung,"
takes us out of the round of purely moral conceptions, and attempts,
after the religious form, to impart a* life and spirit to morality.
The same thing is true when the conception takes the form of an
sesthetic idea, as, for example, when we are asked to retreat into the
" Gedankenland der Schonheit." Some of these conceptions, it will
be observed, appear to be arrived at by supposed generalisation on
ethical subjects. That this generalisation is not scientific, in the
strict sense of the term, is evident from the formula of Strauss to
which I have referred. Strauss pursues the analysis usual with ex-
perimental moralists, but he suddenly adds thereto, without analysis
or experimental derivation, the conception of determination accord-
ing to the idea of the species. How mankind comes to this deter-
mination is not explained. It is merely seen by the author that
some vivifying idea, a principle from without, is necessary to change
the direction of men's lives and thoughts. Lange, in the work from
which I have already quoted, speaks with regard to this question as
if there were needed a " world-inflaming ethical idea and a social
realisation (Leistung)" powerful enough to raise the oppressed
masses one great step. He feels that this is not to be accomplished
by the daylight of the understanding. The victory, he thinks, over
the isolating egoism of our times and the killing coldness of men's
hearts will only be won by a great ideal, which like a stranger out
of another world advances among the astonished people, and with
the demand of the impossible tears the reality out of its sockets.

That is the problem and these are the means proposed from the
ideal standpoint ; but it is not difficult to see that this idea of Lange
is an ideal introduced for the purpose for which the ideas of Comte,
Mill, Strauss, and others, are introduced, namely, to work along with
the daylight of the understanding so far, and then on the principle
of " wage du zu irren und zu traumen," to advance to new moral
victories. The lesson of all these efforts, and not the mere criti-
cism of them, is what concerns us here. The lesson, I think, is
not far to seek. It is the difference between a morality simply as
such, and a spiritual life such as Christianity offers; the want of a
regenerating force in the former, and the need there is for some
such fofce in society and the individual. The objection that tells

CHRISTIANITY AND MORALITY. 295

most against the proposals that have been made in this direction is,
that they look very like galvanising the moral system through some-
thing introduced from without. But these shocks, so far as the
masses are concerned, come out very much as they go in. In so far
as others are concerned, the conceptions sought to be imparted fail
somehow in vital assimilation with the life, mainly because the ideas
are subjective, lying in the thought-world of the beautiful. In this
way a certain standard of culture may be kept circulating in cer-
tain classes of society and in certain individuals, but it is difficult
to see how these can become an integral part of a man's existence,
or act as a transforming power on social life. It was, I believe,
from some such feeling of difficulty that Socrates troubled himself
and his interlocutors so much with the question, Can virtue be
taught ? and the other side of it, Is virtue a knowledge ? The
defect of what may be called the originating power of our moral
nature appeared in one shape or another to be very often in his
thoughts ; and he cuts the knot once at least avowedly, and more
frequently without avowal, by saying, that virtue is neither natural
nor acquired, but an instinct given by God to the virtuous ; in proof
of which he cites a saying, current in his day, that good men are
called Divine. And spiritual life is just this Divine thing, "the
inspiration of the Almighty " in the spirit within us. It is, in the
language of Christendom, the life of Christ transforming our nature,
not only by presenting new objects for our aims, but also by com-
municating new impulses, and wholly new tendencies, in relation to
customary objects. The difference between the spiritual and the
ideal element is largely the difference between veritable fact and cul-
tured imagination. I shall not at present enter on a discussion
regarding the effective influence that the resthetic idea of salvation
may have upon our moral conceptions. This has been already
incidentally noticed as one of the forces that enter into the com-
position of our complex moral ideas. The moral idealist, however,
leaves the facts of existence and projects a picture of a sphere out-
side the actual, to which, in weariness and with the sense of limit-
ation in the actual, he may betake himself for rest and expansion.
He is away, as one of these idealists himself says, with a spring into
the universal. The distinctiveness of Christ's kingdom of righteous-
ness and of His whole conception of life is, that they are based on
the actual and not on the ideal. I shall have to notice this more
at length when I come to speak of some of these conceptions more
in detail. He never leaves the solid facts of the human or the

296 SEASON AND REVELATION.

Divine life. He does not make any spring into the realms of
fancy. There is a basis in fact, and a rigorous realism in the idea
of Christ. '

Bishop Hampden, who was both a philosopher and a divine, holds
an opinion on the relation of Christian truths to moral principles which
is very nearly the opposite to that now stated. He maintains that
" the truths of Christianity are presented to these" (the moral prin-
ciples of our conduct) " as objects towards which they should tend."
And again, " It is only results of which revelation informs us — the
ultimate relations and effects of what we have already by inquiry
ascertained." 41 Dr. Hampden here means by results the ultimate
reference of the principles of conduct to an invisible eternal world,
and the ultimate effect in a future life of their present observed
tendencies. And expanding this, he says, " there is no addition of
any new moral fact to the history of our internal nature," but only
a " presentation of new and more glorious objects to our moral prin-
ciple, giving infinite room for addition to our actual moral improve-
ment." The position is that of a widening of human relations
on a scale exceeding in magnitude that which has been accomplished
by industrial pursuits, extended observations of mankind, as well as
by imaginative conception of the ideal; and no one can estimate the
exact effect produced upon moral thought and feeling by such a
consciousness of widened relationship as that referred to by Dr.
Hampden. Working along with other influences, we have already
seen that this consciousness has been able to transmute, to some
extent, egoism into altruism, helping to destroy savagery, and to rear
what we call modern civilisation. Although it is the opinion of
some, whose opinion is worth regarding, that at the heart of modern
civilisation the veriest savagery may and does exist, that " Faust-
recht," for example, may be practised without actually beating a
man weaker than oneself, that " the abuse of the mere power of
capital on the one side against hunger on the other " is the new
"Faustrecht" of modern civilisation. This would seem to show
that the transmutation spoken of may not be so complete as moral
thinkers are apt to suppose. Christianity has not, however, the object
which Dr. Hampden imagines it to have, either wholly or chiefly.
" These ultimate effects in a future life," which are virtually a re-
fined form of Paley's religious sanction conveyed in his definition of
virtue, as the doing good to mankind in obedience to the will of

Hampden : Bampton Lectures, p. 299.

CHRISTIANITY AND MORALITY. 297

God, and for the sake of everlasting happiness, are not, in the con-
sideration of the highest Christian spirituality, of any moment in
comparison with the new life-principle received into the human
spirit through conscious union with the spirit of Jesus. The feeling
of the Hebrew psalmist, who said, " I delight to do Thy will," had
no reference to such ultimate effects. It was referable to a life Divine
in the man's soul, similar to that in Christ, whose constant attitude
was " not My will but Thine be done," — whose meat and drink, the
nourishment, that is, as well as energy of His spiritual nature, it was
to do His Father's will. That is the spiritual life, the realisation
in the individual of God's will, the endeavour to bring about its un-
impeded activity in mankind at large. The life of the spiritual man
is a perpetual longing : " Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven ; "
that is, done here as it is an ideal state of perfection. There is an
element of idealism in Christianity to this extent, but the idealism
is only with reference to our present condition, and not in Christi-
anity itself as a system existing merely in a cultured imagination.
This is the life brought by Christ and made through Him possible
for mankind. Being in Him we become one with God, whose will
is thus realised in us : " I in them and Thou in Me, that they may
be made perfect in one." This is the root of the Christian law of
living for others, which in practical expression becomes self-sacrifice,
and which in its modern extent and with its derivative virtues will
be seen to be distinctively Christian.

The spiritual life is a life engrafted on a new stock, nourished by-
new juices, bearing altogether new fruit. There is nothing in it
resembling a calculation of consequences; it does not admit of a
balancing of lesser pleasures and pains against greater. On the
contrary, it becomes action, in the face of visible consequences, made
necessary by the new impulses and felt sympathy with Christ.
The subversion of former ideas of life produced, and to the know-
ledge of many so produced, quite apart from theory, is not to be
described but by regeneration. A new birth is necessary, not of
the will of man, but of the will of God ; and death to the former
life is also indispensable. The growth of the new and the death of
the old must proceed together. If we are to put on Christ, to use the
language of Paul, and grow up into Him, we must put off a great
deal that is not Christ. The old man, in the express image of the
same apostle, must die out, if the new man created after Christ is
to grow stronger within us. It is what in ordinary life is called a
new start. Only as our poor weak selves fall off is Christ formed *

298 REASON AND REVELATION.

within us. There is unquestionably much difficulty attending an
adequate account of the living growth into Christ's likeness. There
is one thing which may give a faint illustration of this, although
many degrees behind the reality. We all know what is meant by
a fossil, and how it is formed by secretions from some more or
less enduring substance decomposing vegetable or other decaying
matter bit by bit, until not a particle of the original substance
remains, but only the original form, lines of leaves, it may be —
irregularities of surface. In this way the individuality of the
perishable plant or animal is preserved for ages by the infusion of
the lasting material. In some such manner, only in a consciously
assimilating way, is it with the spiritual life of a man in Christ. It
is, as the New Testament phraseology has it, a daily dying unto
sin and living unto righteousness — a dying that we may so live.
We empty ourselves in fact, that we may be filled, and up to the
measure that we have so emptied ourselves are we filled with
Christ's spirit. We exhaust our own spirit to prepare for the new
spirit. This new spirit was given without measure to Christ.
Mankind may some day have the same spirit also without measure.
This new spirit is the reception of a new power in the soul, which
forms us after Christ until all those characteristics and dispositions
that are Christ's, are unfolded in us. This is not, as Dr. Hampden
puts it, a presentation of new objects, nor does it resemble the
addition of new sanctions. There are new objects, it is true, but
the principal thing is an entirely new point of departure for life
and conduct. There is in it also some " ultimate reference," else
how hopeless were the expectation of growing into Christ P What
a growth is necessary before any man can reach the spiritual
* nature of Him who is the firstborn of every creature, the type,
the ideal realised of our race, and into which the race will yet
bloom ! That is where there is the need for an ultimate reference
to the beyond. The future is a necessary projection for a forward
development, into whose distance we can no more gaze than we
can look into the retreating stages from which all things came, as
we are told. Nothing, however apparently extraordinary in nature,
approaches this sober truth of the Christian religion, that a crea-
ture, spiritually speaking, dug, as our physical ancestors were
according to the supposition of some, from the miry clay, should be
able to put on the Lord Jesus Christ, the image of the invisible God.
We make much of the modern conception of physical development
from low, and what many consider degrading, forms of life ; but

CHRISTIANITY AND MORALITY. 299

this moral and spiritual . development through Christ leaves the
wildest theory of physical development far behind. It is an idea
purely Christian, and the principle of its working is as distinctively
Christian. Even those who, as Christians, may be supposed to
hold this idea, do not half comprehend the revelation of human
capacity in moral life that it carries with it. If they did, it
would stagger them by the vastness of the conception. In view of
the present state of society it would often appear to them wholly
incredible. A world of Chris ts ! for that, I suppose, is what this
new life-principle is working towards ; that is really the meaning
of the new kingdom. We speak the words, but the thought that
lies beneath the words is much too large for any utterance ; and yet
in words whose simplicity is the inspiration of confidence and firm
assurance, we are told by one who drank deeply of this new spirit
and life, that it doth not yet appear what we shall be — most truly
not ! but when it doth appear we shall be like Him. No idealist in
morals has dared, even in " irren und traumen," to imagine this.
It is, for a moralist, a leap, but a leap into a veritable spiritual
order of truths. The idealist should at least welcome such a con-
ception, although he is perhaps more likely to take objection to
the form of it, just as the scientific moralist will object to the
idea of the creation of spirit-life — the formation of a new type
of character. I do not know that, in view of variations in types
in nature, we need be astonished at this new spiritual formation,
the founder and progenitor of which, as giving it its tendency and
character, is Christ.

The New Testament writers have the fullest right to call those
who receive the principles of the new kingdom — perhaps we may
see that very few have received them in their entirety — new crea-
tures. We muBt, however, in order to pronounce an opinion on
this, take the best type of this new creature ; and I ask, Are there
in the moral world creatures like it anywhere on earth ? Do we
honestly expect the world in its course of moral development, with
the ripening of the spirit of the time, to make anything in the
shape of a new man, or to remake society P Has any one ever
seen a man new-made on the purely moral method P Morally, as
well as otherwise, like begets like, and, in Bible language, a world-
ling can only have a progeny that are of the same spirit. This
kind of exposition will be called mystical by some, although, if it
were translated into the language of idealism, it might be found by
the same people to have a basis of intelligibility. The succession

300 BEASON AND REVELATION.

of types is a mystery altogether, and the introduction of variations,
whether they be moral or physical, does not certainly lighten the
mystery. Bat, I am confident that it would materially increase
the mystery for us were the spirit of Christ only to produce a
higher and better sort of worldling: continuing the old type
morally, with a slight variation as we say. Christians and moralists
have been looking for this and working for it. It has been the
ambition of the majority of Christians to rear a better moral life
merely. The motives to this procedure have been numerous ; but
fear of being thought extreme in following out the Christian ideal
is not the weakest of them. This is not what Christ looked
forward to, nor is it what Paul expected to see spring out of the
death of Christ. The typical Christian, in reality, is morally and
spiritually, like a man of another race. He is of another race ; he is
a son of God, the son of man that is to be. The principle of
his inner life is different from a merely moral principle. He starts
from a life in God — a life that roots itself in God, and that goes
out to Him. It is not difficult to see what new formative forces
lie in such a soil, when the spirit of man grounds itself in it, as
Christ did. And as in Christ no one can detect any remnant of
the old type, any evidence of His having grown morally out of the
wisdom of expediency and worldliness and selfishness, any moral
marks of kinship with the herd of men, of kinship even with many
that call themselves His followers ; so neither should such marks
be seen in those who are really in a measure Christlike. It was
thus to new-create men spiritually and morally that Christ came.
The meaning of His work is missed until we recognise this ; nor will
His mission be fulfilled until this is accomplished.

In order to see how far we are from this ideal of the kingdom of
Christ, we have only to look at Christ Himself and His idea of the
new kingdom, and then turn to ourselves and the general con-
dition of society. But the forming spirit is not defeated in its
plastic power. Forces may be in abeyance for awhile, or rather
they may require time, as we know from physical science they
sometimes do, in order to effect any material change in what they
act on. The " powers of the world to come " are spoken of in the
New Testament, and whatever interpretation be given to the parti-
cular passage where this expression occurs, I believe, that among
the powers of the coming time will be the forces partially locked
up at present in the spirit of Jesus. Morality on its practical side,
so far as we can yet see, has no such store of native force wherewith

•

*

CHRISTIANITY AND MORALITY. 301

to act upon humanity ; and on its scientific side it is like other
sciences, in being the rationalised knowledge of what is. Christi-
anity is not a science. It is, as contrasted with this side of ethics,
the unfolding of what onght to be. And not only so, but we have
the practical manifestation of this imperative, to borrow a phrase
from moral philosophy, reaching, both for the individual and hu-
manity, far above all mere moral conceptions, or even rasthetic
and other ideals. We have, too, what ethical experience has not
given us, a starting point from which it is possible for men to
attain the goal of Christian effort, and reap the harvest of Christ's
life and death. There is both the " world-inflaming idea and the
social Leistung " in Jesus. In Christianity rightly understood lies,
through its idea and realisation, the hope of the world, the reno-
vation of society, the gradual elevation of the masses of humanity,
and the ultimate moral and spiritual perfection of our race.

The keynote of Christianity and the Bible teaching generally is
the relation of man's life to God in every act and thought and
feeling. It is this that gives it what is called its spirituality.
Morality has, as I have explained more fully in a previous chapter,
its root in sensible experience, and plainly bears evidence of its
origin in its flower and fruit ; spirituality has its root and source
in the Divine. The point in which they meet is in man's relations
to his fellow-men and to himself, if I may so represent a certain
class of duties. It is in their points of departure, no less than in
their principles of operation, to which I have already referred, that
morality and Christianity differ. That is what some would call a
difference in the form of the moral doctrine, and it is held that the
peculiarity of a religion in a moral aspect consists in its form, and
not so much in its material teaching. That is, however, only
one of the distinctions of the Christian religion compared with
morality. While, therefore, meeting in the relations above referred
to, ethics and religion have a resultant at the point of junction very
widely different, although we are accustomed to class both effects as
moral.

This confusion of thought has been due to some extent to the theory
of morals known as the a priori theory, which, being based, as we saw,
partly upon elements unconsciously borrowed from spiritual truth
and the religious side of our nature, has led necessarily to the result
just pointed out. In speaking of morality, therefore, as a body of
Scripture truth, I feel compelled to limit myself for the most part
to the theory of morals based upon consequences, which gives what

302 REASON AND REVELATION.

is usually known as the utilitarian law of happiness.* This latter
theory, as being the experiential one, is alone thoroughly and rigidly
scientific. Morality, according to this theory, brings our actions
under the law of consequences. The a priori theory, on the other
hand, introduces into the experiences of moral relations an ideal
element, whose deduction, in the opinion of an idealist himself t
is imperfect, whose principle is susceptible of improvement, and
whose truth must stand or fall with the general doctrine of the
categories. A discussion in full of such a question would clearly be
out of place here. We have already seen that this method is not
necessary for the explanation of strictly moral ideas — that the child-
hood of the world with its human intelligences corresponds in some
degree to the same period in the individual man ; that the young
world intellect, rude and untutored, rose from the observation and
chronicling of simple, isolated, and sensible facts to narrow con-
clusions from these, forced upon it by the ordinary necessities of
life, even as a child learns its hard lessons in the nature and effects
of the several objects, which, in its daily experience, it has to do with
— storing up slowly perceptions of what is hot and cold, soft and
hard, near and distant — through a fall learning that air will not
sustain it like the ground it creeps on, that walls will not permit it
the same easy transit as the open room, that fire will burn and that
other things, although not exactly resembling fire, will also scorch.
In a similar way, but at a much later period both in the age of the
individual and the race, can we explain the growth of a primitive
moral experience. An experience which we have seen was perhaps
at first scarcely what men now call moral, but rather a kind of at-
traction and repulsion in the sphere of action and personal relation.
Just as the gods have their root in nature and sensible experience,
so has morality, although both afterwards shot through the soil in
which they grew, and have manifested great beauty and strength in
their later growth ; but not so great, perhaps, as we, standing at the
distance we do from these times, sometimes imagine.

This method, or something like this, although carried on in a

• I accept the formula of the theory, but must at the same time enter a pro-
test against its extreme inadequacy as an expression of the last generalisation in
abstract morals. It is a convenient counter in thought, but it must have an
interpretation put upon it wider than the opposing school is inclined to grant,
and more nearly approaching, and transcending even, what Austin, and after him
Mill, have assigned to it,

f Lange.

CHRISTIANITY AWD MORALITY. 303

much faller and broader manner as life and the colouring of life
become more varied, must be pursued in the investigation of morals.
If we take the ancient thinkers on morals, we shall see, underneath
different lines of thought springing out of different phases of culture,
the scientific method in outline. The process of mensuration in
the Protagoras, and the mean of Aristotle, are characteristic notes
in earlier thinkers ; and such ideas unite Plato and Aristotle, for
example, to each other, notwithstanding divergences that have been
thought radical, but which are essentially only superficial. And
these conceptions, with the kindred one of moderation, and the occa-
sional reference of virtue to knowledge by Plato, and the appeal
to the wise man by Aristotle to decide the mean, lead us back to
the idea of a growth similar to what I have described. Kant's two
forms of the categorical imperative, on the other hand, may be taken
as the purest form of d> priori or ideal, or what I have called the
quasi-revelation method. It is, in fact, an offshoot of Christianity,
only more complex than Christianity, and is, accordingly, unsatisfac-
tory and ineffective. " Act according to that maxim only which you
can wish at the same time to become a universal law," Kant says ;
but there is nothing said about the man who is to formulate the
maxim according to his wish. In Christ we have the noblest wish,
the highest idea consequently, and this not only maximised but real-
ised. That is not leaving the rule in the condition of a maxim
desired by " you " to become a universal law, whoever may be ad-
dressed as " you ;" for it is clear that different men would desire
different laws to be universal. Kant says again, " Act so as to use
humanity, as well in your own person, as in the person of another,
ever as an end and never merely as a means." This is, again, not a
maxim of experience, but an adumbration of spiritual truth. In Christ
we have the idea and the act : " My meat is to do the will of Him
that sent Me ;" " He saved others ; Himself He cannot save."

Kant and the a priorists do not profess to base their system on
induction. In reality, their position is, that there is an element not
given in experience, an ideal or formal principle. But until we have
an analysis of the formal principle or categorical imperative more
in accordance with science, and an explanation of its origin, we may
dismiss it as unscientifically introduced. I have no doubt myself
that it is obtained from what some call the kernel of the religious
idea, that is, its distinctive and separate peculiarity stripped of all
that is temporal and locaL It is the universal in the religious con-
ception, which, in the opinion of those I speak of, is simply the notion

304 REASON AND REVELATION.

of an ideal in life towards which men should direct their efforts. In
comparing Christianity with morality, however, we must keep strictly
to what morality really is. The principles of the deductive method are,
therefore, properly outside our present consideration, although it
might be shown that on the point of vitality and social influence they
are a long way behind spiritual truth, and, in fact, radically different
from the spiritual idea as seen in Christ. We shall accordingly in
this connection consider rather the inductive method in morals.

Ethical philosophy in propounding the question, What is the end
of life ? has attempted the solution of a problem insoluble on a
more inductive method through sensible experience. This is no more
proper an inquiry in moral science, than it is in physical science. It
is quite possible, that the strenuousness with which moralists have
pursued this inquiry, has been one reason at least for the slight ad-
vancement that moral science has made relative to other sciences.*
They have mistaken a metaphysical question, natural to man, for
the question of a particular science. Mr. Mill, in the remarks
quoted in the note below, goes the length of identifying the summum
bonum with the foundation of morality. This might, perhaps, be
possible, were morality the science of what ought to be ; but the
same philosopher would have objected to such a definition of the
science. It is and must remain as a science, like other sciences, the
rationalised knowledge of what has been and is. In imaginative and
noble minds there will rise out of the investigation of what is and
has been hoped and expectations of something higher and purer that
is to be. But, what is distinctively scientific and not hortatory and
imaginative will be found to be a branch of historical and sociological
inquiry. This forward look in moral science very much resembles
the exercise of imagination in physical science to which I have
already referred. The attempted solutions, therefore, of the chief
good in relation to moral and social life have been only, and neces-
sarily, partially true. On consideration, it will be manifest to all
that there can be little likelihood of reaching what may be called
perfection in moral theory by simple induction, from the very fact

* Mr. Mill dwells with regret on this fact. " From the dawn of philosophy the
question concerning the summum bonum, or what is the same thing, concerning
the foundation of morality, has been accounted the main problem in speculative
thought ; . . . and after more than two thousand years the same discus-
sions continue, . . . and neither thinkers nor mankind at large seem
nearer to being unanimous on the subject, than when the youth Socrates
listened to the old Protagoras."

CHRISTIANITY AND MORALITY. 305

that such a method, based as it is on observations and human ex-
periences, and generalisations from these, cannot necessarily rise
above the phenomena generalised. Facts in moral science are in rela-
tion to a condition of things, ethically considered, notoriously im-
perfect. Then it may be asked, Why begin moral inquiries with such
a question at all ? We do not now start in natural science with
teleological inquiries. Whether the scheme in nature be perfect or
imperfect is a matter of dispute with some thinkers, but not a matter
of inquiry to a physicist. He observes, and compares, and draws
his conclusions, and leaves to others the questions of final causes — of
pessimism or the reverse. There is no dispute regarding the cha-
racter of humanity on its moral side — that it is, ethically considered,
imperfect, that our observations give us laws of this condition of
things and not the laws of a state altogether out of conditions. The
data being, therefore, in relation to the summum bonum, of an imper-
fect character, the conclusion drawn therefrom cannot be taken as
absolutely correct ; in fact, we are not in a position from such data
to formulate any conclusion on the question of the mmmum bonum.
With regard to the solution of this question in relation to spiritual
life we can speak more confidently. No solution of it here was even
approximately true on a bare scientific method. I hope to be able
to show that the exact answer in relation to social life, and indi-
vidual life as well, depends on the answer we receive to this question
as regards our spiritual nature. It is not to be wondered at, how-
ever, that the question has sought and found a place in philosophy.
Men have asked, again and again, for more than the two thousand
years of which Mr. Mill speaks, with something like vehemence, and
occasionally with weariness, What is the end of life P What is the
meaning of all the toil and labour in the world, the living and striv-
ing, the restless expenditure of energy and power, the waste of body
and mind, the ceaseless change, the reiterated events among nations,
polities, and individuals, which, in some of our moments, appear not
different from, and hardly less monotonous than the iteration of the
seasons or the sequence of nights and days P To what good P men
cry. What profit hath a man in all his labour P Is it not vexation
and vanity ? Does it not seem as if there were no end served by it,
no law governing the untiring activity of mankind, unless the law of
blind expenditure of superfluous force, or the transmission of such
force P If, in any throng in the centres of modern industry, a
thinker were to propound to the various workers, as they labour and
sweat, the question regarding the ultimate result or object of their

x

306 REASON AND REVELATION.

work and aims, and their spiring of action, they would probably look
at him in Bimple astonishment. They do it, possibly as they feel,
because they must. And is there really a common end to this mul-
tiplicity of pursuit and the intricate relations that grow out of these
pursuits — to that poor workman, for example, sorrily clad and fed,
and as sorrily furnished within, bending over his load of excavated
rubbish ; to that skilled artisan fashioning curious forms from rude
incurious blocks of matter ; to that designer whose sasthetic taste
conceived the image for the workman's help ; to that idle and luxu-
rious man who is able, through stored up labour, to purchase the
labour, in muscle, nerve, and brain of others P Is there one end for
work apparently so much unlike, as the soldier's work of war, the
poet's peace song, the painter's canvassed colouring of life P Do all
these seek, consciously or unconsciously, and more or less dumbly,
but with much struggling, the same thing P It is to this question,
not perhaps put in this way, but rather in the form of a moral
sanction, that philosophy has tried to give the answer ; and to all
this and much more it has answered, Happiness, — meaning by that
term very different things at different times, and according to the
individual men who said happiness, and also according to the dif-
ferent moods of the same men's minds. It is one form of many
shapes, and answering well to the actual multiplicity of ends con-
ceived by the many eager crowds who have set up their goals in life.
It has, however, in its very concreteness, been nearer the truth than
has sometimes been imagined by those who spake the words with
merely an abstract meaning and a philosophical intention. It has come
still nearer the truth, although the legitimacy of this later step may
be scientifically questioned, since the end was widened to the greatest
happiness of the greatest number, and not confined merely to the in-
dividual's happiness.* The principle of philosophical utilitarianism
is the highest criterion of action that scientific investigation has
reached, possibly the highest that it can reach. But to the question so
often asked, Why is happiness postulated as the standard of action ? it
has supplied no answer, and never can, since it takes its stand on this,
as confessedly the ultimate ground and final test that scientific obser-
vation can gather from experience. Not until the principle of the
spiritual life becomes, through the life and spirit of Christ, recog-

* The weak point, speaking scientifically, of utilitarianism is just here. It
is possible that it leaves simple experience and induction, and introduces, some-
times in a very subtle manner, an ideal and partly religious element.

CHRISTIANITY AND MORALITY. 307

nised among men, and the source of social activity, will tbe answer
to this question be forthcoming,* and the true position of philo-
sophical utilitarianism be determined, in its proper subordination
in the order of truths. I do not say that happiness will then be the
postulate of ethics ; but the answer, whatever it be, will come from
the related sphere of spiritual truth.

There need be nothing in this to astonish those, who are familiar
with the light cast upon subjects under discussion in one branch of
science, by the ascertained principles of a cognate field of inquiry.
There are points reached, from whose elevation order and light below
take the place of confusion and darkness ; perplexities are cleared,
the chaotic takes shape from these summits as suddenly and gloriously
as when the early sun, turned on the darkened earth, gives definiteness
to the indefinite blur of night and forms, by illuminating, the cold,
grey, creeping vapours. We are all acquainted with such illuminat-
ing principles in thought, and the New Testament is not without such
lights radiating from Christ, who has been called the Sun of Right-
eousness. This illuminating power is in the spiritual sphere, as the
name may show ; for it is no empty designation to call Him the Sun of
Righteousness, but an expression of the deepest significance. Being
thus concerned with righteousness, the Bible cannot fail to be with-
out relation to the moral life of man ; and it is in this sense that one
characteristic of the Scripture is very markedly the commingling of
principles that admit of the widest application to human life in
general, along with that which is distinctively an unfolding of truths
in religion and in spiritual life. This characteristic is, however, rather
the result of a descent upon moral truth from the spiritual stancrpoint,
than a separate moral revelation. But, whether by this descent or
not, the moral life has been brought into intimate relation with the
spiritual, and, as we shall see, raised and purified by its contact with
it. In order that an action may, in the present day, be thought in
the highest degree estimable, it must be seen to harmonise, not only
with a moral law discernible by experience, but with a more or less
clearly perceived spiritual law, or, as it is sometimes considered, an
ideal or formal law. This will be seen to be the principal explana-
tion of the prominence of virtues generally thought distinctive of
modern European civilisation.

The chief difference between the moral kingdom and the kingdom

— -_. — l

* " No reason can be given why the general happiness is desirable," Mr. Mill
says, " except that each person, so far as he believes it to be attainable, desires
his own happiness."

x 2

308 REASON AND REVELATION.

of heaven established by Christ is, that in the former we have a
standard of duty and good which has sprung from our human rela-
tionships merely, in the way already shown ; and in the latter the
standard has originated in a Divine revelation, yielding a higher law
of life. There has been, as yet, no clearly defined connection in thought
established between the two spheres of moral and spiritual truth.
Practically they have been acting on each other, to the improvement
of morals and the detriment of spiritual life, and winning, on the
whole, a general higher practical moral advancement with a universal
lower spiritual ideal. If a doctrine, it has been said, of any kind
does not harmonise with higher related truths, however true it may
be in itself, it becomes " falsehood when practically carried out."
And that is most likely the reason why there is in our social and trade
life so much practical falsehood. The morally correct man of the
present day does not excite in our minds any excessive emotions of
admiration ; he is often not an object of any moderate esteem. And
the reason is plain. He is a man who follows the lower good, which,
true enough in its sphere, becomes false when opposed to the higher
in the related sphere. Such an one has only learned the law of moral
life, but the highest development of this is not possible practically,
any more than theoretically, considered, without the higher law given
in spiritual life. The moral law of happiness itself becomes false to
a spiritual being, and the declaration of St. Theresa is nearer truth
and nearer Christ, when she wished heaven and hell blotted out
that she might serve G-od for Himself alone. Few Christians have
as yet risen much above the happiness principle. The majority of
them are in what may be called a moral condition merely, — many of
them in a lower condition, morally, than others, who, rejecting the
accompaniments of Christian organisation and theological thought,
have drunk deeply of the spirit of Christ, and do not, like a few
nominal Christians, lean heavily on those future rewards and
punishments that pained the sensitive Christian saint.

The relation of Christianity to the moral elements in social life and
modern culture will have to be considered, but, in the meantime, I shall
proceed to give a rapid sketch of the relation of the material contents
of Christianity, so far as it is moral, with the contents of morality.
The question at present is not with regard to the distinctive life force
of each — not with regard to the form of Christianity and morality, but
with regard to their matter. I have already noticed the position of
Strauss towards Buckle and industrialism, but it may be as well to
give his opinions as nearly as possible in his own words. The beg-

CHRISTIANITY AND MOBALITY. 309

ging monks of the Middle Ages, as truly as the begging system at
the present day in Borne, he says, are genuine Christian institutions.
These are limited in Protestant lands only by culture, which has
quite other sources. There is not anything that may be presented
to human activity as aim and object, which has a real worth in the
eye of Christ ; all effort and endeavour affcer that is not merely vain,
but fox man, in the attainment of his real end, be it nothing (in allu-
sion to Buddhism) or a heavenly kingdom, is indeed a hindrance.
In the teaching of Jesus the industrial impulse is not acknowledged,
its activity in the furtherance of culture and humanity is not under-
stood. Christianity shows itself in this respect as a principle
thoroughly at enmity with culture. To attribute the present state
of society and industry to Christianity, or its influence in any way,
is reckoned by Strauss either a sign of magnanimity, or weakness,
or hypocrisy in a thinker.* The illustrations for such a picture of
Christianity, as is here given, are drawn from the parable of the rich
man, who is represented by the industrial school as considered by
Christ fit for hell, merely because he lived splendidly and dressed
sumptuously ; or from the story of the wealthy young man, whom
Jesus did not know better to advise than, besides fulfilling the law,
to sell all and give to the poor.

But the charge goes further than this. Not only are the opinions
on morals that Jesus pronounced, condemned by Strauss ; silence on
certain moral points equally calls forth his censure. There is no
promise of heaven to the virtues that are shown in war, and no word
for the peaceful political virtues, — for love of fatherland and burghal
worth. Nay, even the virtues of home and family life are not to be
found in the teaching of Jesus. Besides these, there is another class
of virtues that unquestionably, even in the opinion of Strauss, are
to be ranked neither as tending to " Armuth cultus " nor " Bettelei,"
and are yet distinctly named and insisted on in the teaching and life
of Christ. This class, however, is not peculiar to Christianity. It
includes love to one's neighbour and others, gentleness, and com-
passion. These virtues are not only found elsewhere, but found in
a better form than we see them in Christianity ; for this love of
others, it appears, is, in Christianity, limited to those who believe
with us in the same means of salvation. The pure form of this love
is the outcome of the " unbelieving, world-philosophy culture " of
the 18th century. All this is equivalent to a charge, that what in

* <t

Der alte und der neue Glaube," p. 62, ff.

310 REASON AMD REVELATION.

Christianity is new is not true, and what is true is not new, and what
is both new and true, in the division of life with which it deals, is
not to be found in its teaching. That appears a very definite issue
between Christianity and morality ; bat it is really not so definite as
the very dear statements of Strauss would lead one to expect. The
lucidity is gained at the expense of nice shading. From the stand*
point of Strauss, with regard to religious and spiritual questions gene-
rally, the first class of virtues, for example, to which he takes objec-
tion are easily confounded with the wretched outcome of beggary
and poverty. It is easy to see the extreme arbitrariness with which
certain conditions of society, when bad, are in some countries traced
by him wholly to Christianity, as if— an impossible occurrence — no
other causes had been operative there ; while opposite results are de-
picted as reached in Protestant lands, because in these districts other
causes were at work to counteract purely Christian tendencies. That
may do very well for a vehement polemic, but it is not philosophy.
Christianity, since it became a power in morals and social life, has,
at no tune, acted alone, nor has it always operated according to the
intention of its founder. It is, therefore, an ignoring of the element-
ary laws of sociology to speak as if such were the case.

The picture that Strauss draws may be reversed, and some will
think with more truth. It is possible to say that Christianity is the
cultus of wealth and industry ; that the most advanced peoples in the
world, in energy and perseverance and inventiveness, as well as in
material well-being, are, without exception, Christian peoples ; that
those peoples who are Protestant, who accept, as some think, the
most enlightened view of Christianity, are the most distinguished in
these respects ; that, in the countries where less or different results
are evident, counteracting agencies have been at work, rendering, to
some extent, ineffective the normal tendency of Christianity.

That at least may be set over against the description which Strauss
has given. We shall see by-and-bye that the working out of such
problems is not so easy ; that at least these problems are not to be
decided in an off-hand manner. Strauss, and those who think with
him, may, however, be taken upon other ground. The principles
which they despise, and, I think, underestimate, are principles opposed
to the culture they have espoused. It becomes in that case very
much a matter of taste with a man what social force he pitches upon,
as the moving force. Some are all for industry, art, science, com-
fortable well-being, and intellectual and aesthetic enjoyment; others,
without altogether despising these, are for what may, by contrast, be

CHRISTIANITY AND MORALITY. 31 1

considered asceticism and despisal of the world. The latter think that
there is something worth living for besides accumulating wealth and
the means for luxury ; that men have higher objects in life than the
cultivation of music, poetry, painting, or even science ; that although
Jesus may not, by one class of thinkers, be taken as the model suc-
cessful man, He is, in their view, the one successful man, as. having
lived the most perfect ideal life. For two such temperaments to
agree upon fundamental conceptions of life is nearly impossible.
The only thing rationally to be expected is, that the one will make
an effort to understand the other. To represent the fundamental
thought of Christ, as has been done, as pourtrayed in the parable of
Lazarus and the rich man, and then to read this parable as if it
meant, God will punish the rich yonder for his comfort here, and
recompense the beggar hereafter for his misery in time, is something
not far short of a burlesque on Christianity. If this representation
of Christianity were true, it might be called, as it has been, an en-
couraging "of opium-smoking of pictures of blessedness in the world
to come," and a temptation to listless indifference here. The fact,
that practically it has not done so, is some reason for suspecting
this reading of the fundamental thought of Jesus. Such readings
as those given above show anything but insight into the stories nar-
rated to illustrate a principle. To take every incident as if it were
a step in an argument, and to miss the illuminated moral or spiritual
truth, is to mistake the nature of story-telling in moral or spiritual
subjects. I will not deny that one fundamental thought of Christ's
teaching is the despisal of the abundance of things ono possesses
as compared with, what He calls, life itself. What, in. the introduc-
tion to the parable of the rich man with the well-stored barns, who
reversed this plan of life, is called covetousness — irXcoi«£/a, is the evil
against which Christ contends. It is not the evil of wealth in
itself, but of undue estimation of it. At no time in the history of
the world was this an unnecessary line of thought to take ; at pre-
sent it is still needful. We need not decry industry. I do not know
any word of Christ's that can bear such an interpretation ; but the
selfish accumulation of wealth and the selfish enjoyment of it, the.
greed for gain, and hunger for the " abundance of things," the pas-
sion for luxury, and tj^e indifference to misery which it brings, are
real evils now, and were no less so in Christ's time. They are
evils, moreover, of so momentous a nature as to render some such
position as that which Christ took up imperative, if they are to be ,
eradicated from society.

312 REASON AND BEVEIATION.

The protest of Jesus is not against the mere evil of mammon in
itself considered ; nor is it, as is supposed, the result of a blind in-
difference to industry and commercial activity on His part. It is a
protest against an ethical view of life that enters into every social
relation, and more or less affects the moral well-being of society.
Christianity is, therefore, in social questions the supplanting of a per-
sonal regard by a universal interest. In individual morality it is the
introduction of what, from one side, would be called an ideal ele-
ment into morals ; from the other, it is a religious as against a simple
materialistic view of life. The illustrations, as I have said, have
been taken for the things themselves. The illustrations must be
viewed in the light of the general teaching of Jesus, and we must
try to get behind the imagery to the formal teaching that is conveyed
through it. It is not true, for example, that the rich man, simply
for being rich, was thought, in the language of the time, deserving
of hell. His relation to the class that Lazarus represents is the vital
element in the story, because it is the ethical element, and shows the
absence of the religious feeling. The meaning of Christ's answer to
the young man who had the large possessions, must be seen through
the young man's own question. That bore upon what is called
entering into life, or obtaining eternal life, or in whatever way we
may put it : and there are many ways of expressing a question,
which each of us must ask or answer in a way. There are in the
main two ways in which this question may be answered. There
is the answer of the young man — an answer which based itself, in
the last resort, on selfishness — on what Christ calls pleonexia,
meaning by that what I have described as the theory of life con-
sisting in abundance of good things and good pleasures ; the theory
of gain, of luxury, of self-seeking in a more or less refined form.
As opposed to this is Christ's own plan. Expressed in relation to
the young man, it is, " sell that thou hast, and give to the poor,
. . . and come, follow Me." We must, however, remember the
distinctive feature of Christ's method of teaching. That, I think,
may be described as teaching through principles embodied in parti-
cular cases. The principle must be drawn from the case, and the
principle behind the case of the rich young man will be found to be
the real ground-thought of Christ and Christianity, as opposed to the
imagined one given by Strauss and others, viz., a life to others and
not to ourselves, a rejection of everything that hinders the growth
of the principle of Christ's own life in us. If this hindrance be
wealth, then give up the wealth ; if it be Mends, then, as against the

i

CHRISTIANITY AND MORALITY. 313

idea of the new kingdom, let them go. Whithersoever Christ goes,
we mnst go, even to the length of having nowhere to lay onr head.

Looked at from the standpoint of culture and industrialism, and
particularly from practical materialism, this appears, undoubtedly,
extreme and fanatical, and equivalent to a denial of the world. But
no one who knows social life, and the hold that a course of conduct,
long pursued, and strengthened, as it often is, by the self interest of
man and its harmony with the prevailing customs, has upon the
thoughts and feelings of mankind, will for a moment imagine, that
anything less extreme can work effectually in leavening society.
The men who have come nearest to this fundamental thought of
Christ's teaching are by no means always Christians so-called.
Comte, for instance, and Mill are in some matters nearer the heart
of the teaching of Jesus on this subject than any professed theologian
that I can at present name. It is not less of the advice that Christ
gave to the young man, but more of it that is needed, and needed
with what I have called particular application. I believe, that were
it accepted, the real power of Christianity would be seen to be not
less favourable to industry than other influences, but more humane
in the relations of industrial life, and more effective in lifting society
out of its too often vulgar idea of what its life consists in.

On another view of this subject of the cultus of poverty, it is
evident that Christianity has not been so far wrong in its reading
of social evils. The question of the poor is, in older civilisations,
a burning one. The relation between the poor and those above them
is a question that no system of morals has faced. Industrialism is
supposed by some to have intensified the difficulty and made the
question hotter. Culture is almost a kind of mockery as applied to
it. We cannot ask these poor people to retreat with Schiller " in des
Ideales Reich." It is questionable how many well-to-do people even
would understand the meaning of such a retreat, in its bearing upon
such questions as I have mentioned.

The charge of silence on certain important virtues, which has been
made against Christianity, is not so important as it looks. I have
already said that Christ is no philosopher. He gives no system
and no summary of morals, no category of the virtues. It is fair to
deduce these, however, from the principles of His life and the
ground- thought of His teaching ; and if this be, as I have said, " no
one liveth to himself and no one dieth to himself," I know no surer
basis whereon one of these virtues concerning which He is said to
be silent, may be founded, viz., the love of country. Patriotism is

314 REASON AND REVELATION.

simply an illustrative example of the best application of such a
principle. Bnt patriotism is sometimes too narrowly understood. I
consider Christ, or any one who wonld follow Him in raising the
ideal standard of life and thought in his country, and in saving it
from coarse and narrow views of living, and in the end from social
disorder, to be a patriot in the best sense of the word. The same
thing may be said with regard to the family life, bnt we do not need
to make deductions from a principle in order to arrive at a surmise
of Christ's feelings on this latter subject. There are incidents
mentioned in His life that testify sufficiently to His appreciative
admiration of this bond.* The sharp manner in which He set the
family tie over against the spiritual is only a mode of stating the
higher claims of the latter, and is very, much like the manner in
which He set, what is called, the unrighteous mammon against the
righteous.

It is said that virtues which were long taken for granted, as
distinctively Christian, are really independent of Christ and Christi-
anity. These are generally reckoned as mercy, and compassion, and
love of others — friends and foes. It has been seen already how diffi-
cult it is for us to get at the exact meaning of ancient mythology.
I believe it is not less difficult to get at the moral life of early
times. For the moral life is really something different from, the
speculations of philosophers on the chief good. These do not
always give us what we need, viz., a true picture of individual and
national morality, although they may help towards giving us this
picture. In a question like the one now before us, it cannot be the
desire of any student of history to distort paganism. By darkening
it, we by no means increase the splendour of Christianity. Some of
us even now " miss the plain way in the blaze of noon," and al-
though in earlier times it cannot be said that men descried " sun-
shine in midnight," there is evident, on a calm survey of pagan
life, a moral development, which, although perhaps one-sided, makes
the supposition of the Platonic Socrates not so muoh out of the
way, that the moral life must spring from some inspiration of the
gods. It should be borne in mind, however, that it is not sufficient
to establish a resemblance between paganism and Christianity if

. * The scene at the cross, in which His mother appears, recorded by one evan-
gelist, and the touching act of sympathy shown in the story of the young man of
Nain, are only two of many such. His relation to children is not to be over-
looked in such a connection.

CHRISTIANITY AND MORALITY. 315

the names of the same virtues are found to occur in both cultures.
It is incumbent on us to know the contents of these names in the
respective systems, and the relations of such virtues to each other,
in order to get at the typical character in each of these moral
developments. It is a different thing, for example, to find that
compassion was nominally known, and to know what precise mean-
ing was attached to the name ; and both are far from telling us what
position was assigned to such a virtue in the family of graces then
held in esteem by men. With the same virtues in the catalogues
of moralists, and with even the same contents in each, there may
have been in later times an entire facing round of the moral ideal.
These virtues, while retaining their names, may in more recent
times have somewhat altered in meaning and in relation to each
other ; and others, even if perceived in early times, may not then have
come to the front, so that the typical man of the present day may
be an entirely different man from the earlier ideal.

It is this moral ideal that is really the point of contrast between
ancient and modern life, and not the fact that Epictetus, for example,
mentions love of mankind, or that Buddha knew something of
mercy and compassion and the peaceful virtues. Buddha may have
known these in some sense, but his moral ideal cannot be compared
with that of .Christ. I shall mention one fact to show what I
mean. In a sermon, that is deservedly much admired for its high
moral tone, Buddha gives expression to a principle, which had it
turned up in the New Testament would have been immediately
discerned to be against the genius of Christ's teaching. Buddha is
enjoining thrift, and says that savings should be divided into four
portions, — one to live upon, two to trade upon, and one to keep for
the future. We have only to recall the injunction, " Sell that thou
hast," or the principle of life not consisting in the abundance of
what one possesses, in order to see the radically different starting
point in morals, and the different outlook upon the world, that
separate the two teachers. There is, in the advice of Buddha, an
unmistakable note of selfishness and self-interest. It is political
economy pure and simple, and political economy based upon egoism.
The natural outcome of this ideal is heedless pursuit of personal in-
terest and advantage ; and this is not very unlike what an industrial
ideal would give, when unmodified by other influences.

The Christian ideal is not " poverty and beggary," but, on the con-
trary, in spite of poverty and beggary, disgrace and death, steadily
to seek the advancement of the kingdom of righteousness. It is

316 SEASON AND REVELATION.

the confusion of the end with the means to represent contempt for
-wealth as the root of Christ's teaching. It is no more so than it is
death by crucifixion. But the kernel of that teaching is to follow the
ideal which Christ followed — obedience to God's will in Divine rela-
tions ; in human relations not to seek our own bat the things of
others ; to follow this ideal through hardship, through self-denial
and self-renunciation of the extremest kind, through weariness, pain,
and want, if need be to leave behind society, home and its ties,
honour and applause and even wealth itself,— the end of indust-
rialism. I think I may safely challenge any writer to produce a
moral ideal that approaches this. I am perfectly certain that it is
not the ideal of the present day ; and nothing can be more certain
than this, that, as a whole, the moral ideal of the 10th century will
bear favourable comparison with that of any preceding century
known to us. I shall again quote from Lange, whose chapters on
materialism and religion are well worthy the attention both of the
moralist and the political economist. In speaking of the difference
between ancient and modern conceptions of virtue, he says, " Un-
recht abwehren, und Unrecht dulden, die Schonheit verehren, und
die Schonheit verachten, dem Gemeinwesen dienen, und das Gemein-
wesen fliehen, sind nicht nur zufallige Ziige einer verschiednen Ge-
muthsrichtung, bei gleichen sittlichen Grundsatzen, sondern Gegen-
satze, die aus einem bis in den tief sten Grand verschiednen Moral
Princip hervorgehen."

There is a fundamental distinction between the present and the
past in the matter of moral discrimination and ethical obligation.
Our present morality is a pure and holy religious ideal in some
of its aspects, when compared with what we can see from analogy,
or learn from history, to have been worked out by early peoples. The
moral life of the present day is as far above that of earlier times, as
the Christian religion is above their fetishism and mythology ; in-
deed morality and religion appear to stand in an invariable ratio to
each other. It is not so much, then, in the contrast of the categories
of the virtues of Christianity and paganism respectively, that we
shall see the difference between the two systems as moral systems.
But even here there is something to be observed. Self-sacrifice
for others' good we have seen to be the tree that Christianity planted.
What the early writers on Christianity call the fruits of the Spirit,
the excellences of the Christian character, grow on this tree. The
contents of this catalogue of virtues are memorable, and, placed along-
side the life of Christ, are an unanswerable argument in the pre-

CHRISTIANITY AND MORALITY, 317

sent question ; these are, love, joy, peace, longsoffering, gentleness,
goodness, faith, meekness, temperance, — most peculiarly a catalogue
of Christian graces, and varied manifestations of the ideal of a Chris-
tian life as one of self-sacrifice. I am not to be held as maintaining
that Socrates, for example, and others, did not give expression occa-
sionally and in passing to some of these virtues ; but it was a pass-
ing reference. There is no evidence that they were incorporated
in the life of the people, and none that they were prominent even
in systems of moral philosophy. Gentleness, humility, and self-
abnegation were obscured by virtues of the type of courage, partly
moral and largely physical, and magnanimity, that looked sometimes
like magnificence.

There is one point bearing on the present question that has not
always received the attention in these discussions that it deserves.
The matter is in the present day unpopular. It has the bad name
of puritanic fixed upon it, by those who would be delighted with the
name of pagan re-actionists. I mean the sense of sin and ideal holi-
ness that comes to us through Judaea and Him " who did no sin
neither was guile found in His mouth." This sense may have
sometimes become abnormal and positively mischievous in Christian
history, but there can be no question that, in a normal condition, it
bears witness to a deeper moral sensibility, and a higher perception
of a pure moral life, than can be found in paganism. As Carlyle has
said, in his rapid way of coming to the heart of any matter, " the
old world knew nothing of conversion " (nor I may add of repent-
ance, which is the preliminary to conversion) ; " instead of an ecce
homo, they had only some choice of Hercules. It was a new at-
tained progress in the moral development of man. Through Christ
the highest comes home to the bosom of the most limited. What
to Plato was an hallucination, and to Socrates a chimera, is now
clear and certain to your Wesleys." What Carlyle means is,
that in earlier times consciousness of sin, remorse for an ideal not
realised, or for a perfect law transgressed,* were little felt, if felt
at all.

In the present day the sense of sin as sin is by no means a necea-

■ i — i ■ M ■ — — — — — — *

* The Grecian drama seems to contradict this ; bat the agonies of remorse
which iEschylus, for example, describes, are those which arise from the conflict
of opposing moral instincts rather than from the feeling of sin as sin, in the New
Testament sense. They are the outcome of a kind of practical antinomy which
the moralists of the time, as some think, appear to have taken pleasure in de-
lineating.

318 REASON AND REVELATION.

sary factor in a merely moral, as distinguished from a religions life,*
bat there can be little question that it has affected the modern moral
ideal. The feeling of duty, in its present complex form, had barely
emerged in the early moral consciousness, and the sense of holiness
related to the feelings now mentioned is not in any degree so pro-
minent a feature in pagan life as in Jewish. Speculative and prac-
tical morality did not sound emotions in the moral nature at all
resembling what the Jewish revelation had done. And it is mere
matter of history, that with Christ's appearance, and through His
life and suffering, there came a message to mankind that went
further than law or precept, poet or prophet before Him had gone.
It told men how earthly, sinful, selfish, and impure they were. His
life, by its heavenliness, moved, and moves yet, like a rebuking angel
among men, censuring their sordid self-seeking by His entire self-
sacrifice, their pride and magnanimity by His humility, their strifes
by His undisturbed peace, their hatred by His pure and disinterested
affection, their severity by His mercy, their malice by His beneficence,
their low-though tednees by His guilelessness. Many prevalent feel-
ings and ideas in the sphere of personal morals are derived chiefly,
if not wholly, from Christian sources. It is not difficult to see the
wide difference there is between earlier and later times in men's views
regarding personal purity of life. There is nothing more surprising
to us in moral history than the unsusceptibility to, what we consider,
immoral practices, which some of the great and good men in Greece
are represented as exhibiting. . It is a matter of fact that with the
ideal of Christ and Christianity men began to view life and its rela-
tions differently. Their spirits, quickened by this new spirit, saw
more exactly the true dimensions of an evil action. Now vanished,
to a large extent, laws of men, customs of society, data of morality,
TOftTiTTiH of prudence ; and in their stead came the law of Christ and
His all-perfect life. What the Hebrews represented Jehovah to be
was more evident to those who came under the influence of Jesus.
He was felt to be, in a deeper sense than before, the searcher of the
hearts and the trier of the reins of the children of men. The
thoughts and intentions of the heart are not less but more important,
than the actions that reveal them, because out of the heart are the
issues of life. It may be said with truth, that on moral questions
men's feelings have, through Christianity, gained a deeper tone, their

* Mr. Mill, in his Autobiography, speaks of a conviction of sin as something
utterly foreign to him.

CHRISTIANITY AND MORALITY. 319

sentiments nave a higher pitch, their spirits are touched to finer
issues. Within those who have been affected by its spirit, and,
we may afterwards see, within all who have come in any way under
its influence, what I may call, in the sense of Butler, a Diviner con-
science now bears sway, the echo of a Diviner law.

One side of the connection we have been considering remains
to be mentioned, viz., the relation between Christian ideas and
moral conceptions in the present day, and their possible relations
in the social life and character of the future. We are to look, it is
said by some social thinkers, not to the carrying out of the Christian
ideal for the improvement and advancement of the community, but
to a quite different ideal. Christianity, it appears, is not only an
encouragement to poverty and beggary, but also hinders by its doc-
trine of grace independent moral action, and by its principle of revela-
tion investigation into truth. There is the same difficulty in meet-
ing this position, which is that of the scientific side of culture, that
we found in meeting the statement, similar in spirit, from the Bide
of industrialism. It seems, however, probably nearer the truth, that,
viewing Europe and its advancement in scientific investigation, and
considering the foroes at work in this development, Christianity and
its principles have been a helping rather than a hindering agency in
this onward movement. We have seen the influence of Christianity
on the moral life of modern Europe, and we know that notwithstand-
ing much that is erroneous in its interpretation since it was founded,
Christianity still has within itself the seeds that nourish all the
virtues which have distinguished the pioneers of thought. Those who
make charges against the repressing influences of Christianity on
trade and science forget, that there is a possibility of confounding
ecclesiasticism with Christianity. It may just be possible that Galileo
was more influenced by the pure spirit of Jesus than the Church that
persecuted him. I think there is every reason to believe that this
was the case. I see no good ground for supposing, that the Church has
been infallibly right in every case in her interpretations of spiritual
truth and of the religion of Jesus, and that everybody else has been
wholly wrong.

A good case could be made out to show, as Mr. Mill has to some
extent done in his essay " On Liberty," that nominal Christians are
very far indeed from being like Christ. To Bhow this we need only
set side by side the actual life of many Christians of the present
day and the ideal of the New Testament. If a man of thought-
ful mind, but sceptical of Christian truth, were to ask the bulk

320 REASON AND REVELATION.

of Christian men to tell him in what respect their lives differed
from his practice, does any one imagine he would receive a satis-
factory answer P The Christians would enlarge upon the benefits
of Christianity on the whole ; its grand conceptions of life, of duty,
of God. They would point to the general beneficial influences it
has had upon the world ; the almshouses, the charities, and hospitals
it has been the means of raising. But the sceptic might urge : I am
a practical man, and have not time for generalities ; do you, and
those you are connected with, distinguish yourselves in the common
walks of life, in trade and ordinary intercourse, in a way different
from other men? Do these conceptions you speak of ever get
further than the lips of Christians ? Christ says, " Love your
enemies, ... do good to them that hate you ;" His immediate
followers, doubtless from recollection of His teaching and person, talk
much of charity, and call it the bond 6f perfectness ; they tell us to
seek not our own but the things of others ; to set our affections on
heavenly things not on earthly ; and many other such noble senti-
ments they utter ; and I want to know, if you, and Christians of
this year and in this century, translate these noble sentiments into
nobler deeds P Do you bring into social life with you these Divine
principles, as you call them, and invariably apply themp Tour
.coinage circulates with a religions impress, " by the grace of God;"
is its distribution, so far as you are individually concerned, sub-
jected to the principles that you, as Christians, believe God -would
recognise P Do you, even among yourselves, seek to follow the in-
junction, "Love one another," and give, by your proceedings in
Christian organisations, the tone which should regulate other social
bodies P Are Church disputes, for instance, more quietly ordered
than disputes in the world P Are Church courts more seemly in their
procedure P Are theological controversies more fall of that charity
which beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things,
than scientific controversy, for example P What could Christians
answer ? They would, in all probability, say, that to insist on the
self-surrender which Christ exhibited, to sell all as He taught, to go
whithersoever Christ went, even to the length of having nowhere to
lay one's head, is unreasonable and extreme. But, it may be replied,
it is the Christian scheme, which is based on the idea, that no one
can be too extreme in goodness.

Christianity is a great social reforming agency, and it is this side
of it which the Church has misinterpreted in some ways, and some-
times wholly overlooked, but which some philosophers, and socio-

CHRISTIANITY AND MORALITY. 821

logists, and so-called sceptics have incorporated in their ideas of social
amelioration ; and it is in this direction that we mast look for the
interaction of Christian and moral conceptions in the future. No
attempt has been made, with systematic thoroughness, correctly to
estimate the full influence of Christian thought and feeling on modern
social life and opinions, not only directly through the moral element
in man, which I have incidentally done, but indirectly also through
all the activities in modern society — a complex and, perhaps, not
soluble problem. But, after allowing for the operation of other forces
of great moment, and acting with increasing intensity upon an
advancing civilisation, ideas have entered into moral life, the growth
of which appears to be certainly traceable to Christian seed.
Morality, from having a decidedly selfish tendency, has, in its best
form, become unselfish. There is an advance, not always sufficiently
considered, from self-culture as an end, for instance — perhaps the
most refined form of selfishness — to the good of others as an end, and
self -culture as one of the most important means for its attainment.
The moral life, if not in reality yet in idea, has been revolutionised
since the time of Christ, and gradual and, sometimes, imperceptible
as have been the steps, the contrast between periods widely apart
is sufficiently striking, and the progress calculable. It is in not
recognising this fact, that utilitarian philosophers have generally
erred, as I have already hinted, and, from their love of analysis, have
in vain attempted to trace these later ethico-spiritual developments
to the same source as the moral growths properly so called. In this
way it is often felt, that no such analysis has been hitherto sufficient
wholly to account for the elements in self-sacrifice which, in its
modern form, is a result of the Christian idea. The ordinary psychico-
chemical process has completely broken down in the analysis of this
moral quality and its related virtues, because psychologists either
cannot, or will not, see the new element that is at work. In fact,
throughout the whole field of moral philosophy there has been failure
from the non- recognition of ideas, feelings, and sentiments derived
from Christianity, that have stamped themselves, as it were, on the
modern moral sense. The great advancement of morals in Europe
has been by some assigned to other causes, such as industrialism, dis-
covery in physical science, improvements in government, literature,
etc., rather than to Christianity. Many of these reputed causes
are themselves results in the first instance, and are really the original
cause moulded into the many forms of human activity, and thus
disguising itself, unless to very minute and careful inquiry. These

Y

322 REASON AND BEVELATION.

complex agencies nave, undoubtedly, done much to widen the feeling
of human brotherhood, for instance, which, granting that it is not an
original Christian notion, yet owes so much to the force and inten-
sity of the Christian conception and idealisation of it in Jesus, as to
render it, in its present form, almost exclusively Christian. These
reputed agencies, however, do little in their naked operations, and
separated from their primal spring, in fostering this or other virtues
in the Christian acceptation of them. We all know the extreme
selfishness, the crass ethical materialism that often attends a purely
industrial life, when its natural effects are not modified by some
other parsuits or aims.* Unions of masters against men and men
against masters, not self-abnegation or neighbourly love, seem to
be the fruit of industrialism pure and simple. The fact that the
quality of self-sacrifice, as the Christian ideal, stands its ground in
modern life, compelling admiration where it does not win submission,
and has not disappeared under all the weathering agencies to which
it has been ceaselessly exposed, is due mainly, I believe, to its being
based on the life of Christ, whose spirit is still in our midst, vita],
and vivifying many souls. Its expressions in modern life are
numerous. It permeates, but not always under the name of Christi-
anity or the authority of those who imagine that they represent
Christianity, but sometimes protesting against both, into the unseen
details of the commonest life, adding dignity and nobility to these
details by the conscious union imparted to men of each with each,
and of all with an ideal life which is the flower of humanity. In
more imposing shapes, but not necessarily more noble and winning
and soul sweetening, we see it in the disinterested pursuit of truth,
in the unselfishness of our public men,f in that peculiar feature of
Christianity, its missionary spirit, with its noble self-denial and
simple self-abandonment, which go a long way to assure us that
the genius of Christianity is still a veritable power in modern life.

Although the full effect of the New Testament teaching can only
be seen in those who consciously and willingly receive Christ's

* I believe the same statements, with finer epithets perhaps, may be made
of culture.

+ America, if we believe accounts regarding its public life, is a country where
this spirit, in its purest form, seems decreasing, — a sore manifestation in a free
country of abating Christianity and the choking of the growth of the Christian
idea by the worst form of the industrial impulse, which results in the subordina-
tion of love of country and love of others, to self -aggrandisement and personal
suocess.

CHRISTIANITY AND MORALITY. 323

spirit, the personality of Jesus and the spiritual ideas in the Bible
have had a very extensive influence on the whole civilised world.
The action of the spirit and teaching of Jesus on all men, who have
come within the sphere of the forces of Christendom, has been in
a measure that of an unveiling of the thoughts of their hearts.
In a greater or less degree, all who have thus, even in an indirect
way, come into contact with the ideas of the Scripture revelation,
have had an impulse imparted to them, if not spiritual, yet what
may be called moral ; * for, as I have said before, the two spheres
overlap each other in actual life. Christ's appearance has, in an
appreciable manner, been felt by all ; virtue has gone out of Him,
and, in a measure, healed the race. As the all-pervading light of
the natural world, and the varied objects which it displays, affects
the sensible life of every living thing, and invites the activity and
motion of their powers, so the life of Christ, which we have seen to
be essentially a spiritual manifestation, has reached every heart,
and roused the inner motions to action ; because Christ, although
in the first instance unfolding the spiritual, must also exhibit the
highest moral life, from the very fact of His typical manhood. But,
as in nature, all things are not alike affected by the light, so in the
movement of the spiritual consciousness, through this spiritual light,
there are differences in result. As in the sensible world in general
it often happens, that the senses of some individuals, even when
affected, do not awaken corresponding intelligent activity in the
mind, or do not produce this mental response alike in all ; so in the
spiritual world, although in a manner it is felt by all whom it may
be said to embrace as an atmosphere, although meeting, if I may
say so, the sensitivities of the souls of all, it has only in some
produced the corresponding spiritual result. What may be called
its general bearing upon the improvement of mankind must not on
that account, however, be undervalued or lost sight of.

Much of what is best in our present morality, highest and purest
in our social customs, most admired in our literature, most benevolent
in our movements and enterprises for the good of mankind, are re-

* Sir Bartle Frere, as Governor of Bombay, says : " I speak simply as to
matter of experience and observation, and not of opinion ; . . . and I assure
you, that whatever may be told yon to the contrary, the teaching of Christianity
among 160,000,000 of civilised, industrious Hindus and Mahomedans in India
is effecting changes, moral, social, and political, which, for extent and rapidity of
effect, are far more extraordinary, than anything that you or your fathers have
witnessed in Europe." Quoted by Principal Shairp in Good Words.

T 2

324 REASON AND REVELATION.

relations, in a sort, of men's hearts by Christ, fruits of His spirit, prac-
tical expressions of the law of living more for others than ourselves.
It is nevertheless maintained by some, and this with the history
of morals in Europe for the last eighteen hundred years in their
hands, that moral life is capable of the highest progression, and man-
kind of full and perfect development morally and socially, independ-
ent of Christianity.* Social problems, as I have had occasion to
remark already, are of a notoriously complex nature, and as yet
admit in few cases of exact solution. And this question of the
present and future interaction of morals and religion is one of
these problems of which we can only hope for the approximate
demonstration. Two remarks may, however, be made with reference
to the opinion I have noticed above. In the first place, the factor
that is imagined to be unnecessary for the further development of
morals cannot be excluded. The Christian religion, through the
life of its Founder and its more immediate teachers, has been
one of the main forces in European life for nearly two thousand
years. The tendency of this new element in the social forces
is seen, not only in the morality, but in the industrialism, the
government, the science, the whole prevailing life and character
of our time. It cannot even be shown, that we would have reached
the stage at which we have now arrived in any of these depart*
ments of human activity, much less in morals, altogether apart
from the determination of Christianity. And if we cannot do this,
it is evident how thoroughly incapable we are of fairly trying an
hypothesis in sociology, which is and must ever remain such. It is
not with social problems as it is with physical. We cannot actually
exclude elements in any moral compound and experiment on the
result produced by the residuum, and then compare that with the
result produced by the whole. Abstractly even, we are unfit to
grapple with such a question. For no one can adequately represent
to himself the multiform effects of any social force upon a complex
social organism; neither can he see, and properly formulate, the
multiplying consequences that may flow from the withdrawal of
any such force, which is no less difficult a problem. But, when the
question is the withdrawal of an agency in social life that has been
active for centuries, it becomes plain to any one who knows the
generating power of social agencies, how intricate such a process
must be — what discrimination is demanded in order carefully to

* Had this been put, " independent of the present form of Christianity,"
assent might have been easier.

CHRISTIANITY AND MORALITY. 325

detect the later ramifications of this, originally it may be, simple
enough social element. It will itself have been modified, while it
has modified the entire living structure into which it was thrown.
Not in one way only, but in a thousand ways, not always even for
good, but sometimes also for evil, it will have been working and
co-operating in individual and social existence, on the moral and
intellectual parts, and on the physical too. And besides, the
modified effects will have been interacting — changed intellectual
conditions upon altered moral feelings and relations, and transformed
physiological states upon both, and both upon these states, and the
whole three modified and counter-modified individual forces upon the
general, social, civil, and governmental condition, and the revolu-
tions of these combined forms of life upon the simple and individual,
and conversely. The question needs only to be placed fairly before
any one conversant with these subjects in order to convince him
how wild the statement must oe, that we can go on discounting the
Christian influence ; wild, I say, because it is the statement of incon-
siderate and rash speculation on social problems.

The other remark that I would make on the assumed capacity
inherent in morality of advancing independently of religion is, that
were it possible to try this experiment, the success of it would be
more than doubtful. I have no wish to dogmatise on the other
side, because there could not be a sufficient demonstration of such
a position, for the reasons that I have already given. The same
multiplicity and growing complexity render the problem all but
incapable of solution one way or the other, on mere hypothetical
grounds. There are some considerations, however, which, although
not amounting to absolute proof, still carry a weight of probability
with them which, in social questions, admitting mostly of probable
answers, is of high importance, as affording a mean result in a
sphere where we must be guided by averages, or else travel without
a guide altogether. I refer again to the contribution made by the
spiritual truth of the Christian religion to the current morality. We
have seen that the elements which are persistently and most de-
cidedly altruistic, and which, in their highest manifestations, come
under the principle of self-sacrifice or the philosophical formulas
of the Kantian imperative, have resisted the analysis of the moral
psychologist, and been accepted by the moral intuitionist as d
priori deliverances of the moral faculty, while in reality they are
the outcome of the Christian ideal. These, it may be said, however
originating, are now so closely interwoven with established morality,

326 REASON AND REVELATION.

that they have independent root in our moral nature, and may, with-
out any fear of future decadence, be severed from their source.
Allow, the psychological moralist may say, that they have been trans-
planted from Christian soil and a spiritual life into what, if you will
are merely pagan and moral conditions, they are now bo firmly rooted
in the latter, that their growth and nourishment are wholly independ-
ent of their primal conditions ; for the relation, even if dependent
at the beginning, need not, therefore, be so throughout.

The implied analogy, in these remarks, between the transplanted
tree and the transplanted moral feeling is a perfectly just one. The
tree once transplanted grows ; but if it grows, there are certain
circumstances conditioning the growth. If the change be from
the atmospheric influences of the tropics to an extreme the reverse
of that, no one expects growth, and when life is evident, we know
that in some way the natural influences of its changed habitat
have been modified to suit the requirements of the plant. Life is
persistent in the transplanted vegetable, because the circumstances
conditioning its life have been persistent. Original transplantation
of roots and sap is not sufficient ; we have to add to this the con-
tinuous influences that at first ministered to its vitality, if it is
to reach the perfection of its species, or even maintain its exist-
ence. It is well enough known that in animal life, and the instru-
ments with which it performs its various functions, certain con-
ditions are necessary for the normal action and proper development
of its organs, on the withdrawal of which degeneration and defec-
tive energy of the parts ensue, and ultimately, as is thought, com-
plete disuse, evident in certain rudimentary parts of very many
animals. We all have experience how certain mental aptitudes are
acquired, and some of us may have experience of the reverse pro-
cess, which is no less a fact. It is a matter perfectly well known
and authenticated, that moral characteristics vary with varying
peoples, living under conditions diverse in relation to their fellow
men, and to external nature. Certain characteristics continue so
long as their conditioning influences continue, and are changed as
the latter become modified. The alteration, however, once effected
is not by any means fixed and unalterable, neither is it necessarily
progressive in the line of its new departure. Statical conditions
are rare in social life, and only have place in the very simplest and
most primitive stages of it, if they have place even there. P* *
gression in any given direction in social life presupposes, as in
mechanics, a continuous impulse in that direction, without any op-

J

CHRISTIANITY AND MORALITY. 327

posing force. There must be unqualified persistence in the imping-
ing force before there can be continuous and persistent motion in
the direction of its original action.

The new departures in modern life in Europe, as compared with life
during the earlier years of the Christian era, and down to the six-
teenth or seventeenth, and even last century, are the results of new
forces, or old forces modified. These forces are intricate in the very
highest degree, and to assign proportionate values to them is at pre-
sent above the scope of social science. Two of them, however, as we
have seen, stand out with greater prominence than others, — industri-
alism, as it is termed, and Christianity. These two are imagined by
some to be wholly neutralising agencies. This opinion I am not
called upon at present to consider, although my impression is that it
may be found to be much too sweeping a statement. In some direc-
tions they are opposing forces, and, for good or evil, diminish the re-
sult of each other's impact upon the social body. In other directions
they may combine most effectually to produce a common positive
resultant, which would be very perceptibly different by the with-
drawal of either ; nay, which might be altogether different by such
withdrawal, on account of the interference of other forces at present
rendered negative by the union of these controlling influences, but
which would be made positive by their disunion, or the subversion
of either. The spirit of industrialism, we know, is kept alive and
operative by the present constitution of European society, and
would become extinct and ineffective were this constitution to
disappear, and the fabric of society to become in consequence
remodelled. No one can doubt, that in the event of such an
occurrence — in the event of a revolution in men's activities and
engagements, we should have a complete mirror, in the course of
time, of such change in their customs and manners, that is, in their
whole yinoral life. We would not look for the moral experiences
that arose out of widespread and universal industrial conditions,
in circumstances altogether the reverse. The relations and relative
feelings would vanish together. No longer meeting external objects
corresponding to the internal state, the internal state would be
conformed to the objects that it did meet. Annihilate industrialism,
and the spirit, that, through it, is at present with great intensity
animating moral and social life and feeling, would disappear. The
independent advance of morality and social well being would not
follow, but their retrogression, to the extent, at all events, of their
dependence on industrialism. Moral life could not maintain the

328 REASON AND REVELATION.

original impetus, unless there were an equivalent persistent force.
It has no self -generating power, but is nurtured from without ; and
the abstraction of the conditions of growth is a virtual abstraction
of moral energy.

It is not otherwise with the second element — Christianity.
Whatever has been contributed by the spiritual to the moral life
is not once and for all contributed, but, if it is to be effective,
must be continually supplied. We cannot morally, any more than
physically, live upon the food our fathers consumed. If we are
to nourish our bodies we must find food and eat it for ourselves ;
and if our moral nature is to grow, we must have fresh nutriment
and not mere husks or symbols of nutriment. The bare report
of an industrial movement, that vehemently stirred the lives of
our ancestors twelve hundred years ago, could not produce any, or
only the very slightest perceptible, effect upon the society of the
present day. And no more can the record, that eighteen hundred
years ago a new influence, in the form of the spirit of Jesus, entered
into European life, purifying and ennobling it in many ways, purge
and elevate the characters and impulses of the men of the present
With regard to industrialism, we require the actual conditions in
order that the answering feelings may be experienced. It is presum-
ably the same with regard to the spiritual life through Christ. That
it had once been a factor in the moral and social life of man is not
enough. If it is to act effectively along with other moral and social
forces, it must remain a factor. If there were not continual re-
appearings of Christ, in men who imbibe His spirit by living in
intimate relationship with the unseen, like Him, this spiritual force
would be wholly inoperative on our present social life. The mere
idea of it, apart from the influence radiating from a living relation
to the person and life of Jesus, would be without effect.

" Ye are the salt of the earth," Christ said ; " but if the salt have
lost its savour, wherewith shall it be salted ? " I know not ; I sus-
pect industrialism could not do it, nor do I as yet see any spirit
working in men that could do it. I fear, that were morality divorced
from the abiding influence that comes to it through a pure, vigorous
spiritual life in Christ, morality itself would not only lose much of
its power in controlling men's actions, but it would be deprived in
time of its grander conceptions, its finer feelings, and more delicate
sentiments. All morality would not, of course, vanish : it is far too
complex and varied in its origin for any such result to happen, but
the flower of it would disappear.

CHAPTER XVIII.

THE RELATION OP THE BIBLE TO THE SPIRITUAL LIFE AND RE-
LIGIOUS HISTORY OP THE FUTURE.

" We boast our light, but, if we look not wisely on the sun, he smites us into
darkness. The light which we have gained was given us not to be ever staring on,
but to discover by it onward things more remote from our knowledge."

It is very often taken for granted, by those who are termed advanced
thinkers, that the Bible, and the type of life manifested in it, and
produced by its teaching, have attained their last result — that the
spirit of Christianity has worked itself out, and like other exhausted
phases of culture must give place to the new faith, whatever that
may be. We have even received the names of individuals who are
regarded as apostles of the new faith and coming order of things
— men of large thqnght, of earnest mind, who devote themselves to
the good of their fellow men. All must admire the men, at least all
who can be attracted by goodness and unselfishness. The world
sadly needs their best efforts ; but an acknowledgment of these
efforts must as little blind us to the error of their method, as our
convictions, that their opinion of the old faith is erroneous, should
hinder us from recognising the value and importance of their work
for the general well-being. It is, from the Christian standpoint, an
extreme opinion, in a large degree the outcome of an opposite
extreme, which considers the Scripture revelation, and often along
with that, forms interpretations of the significance of its teaching, as
the last word on religious matters.

Between these two extremes of wholesale rejection of the past
history of religious life and feeling, and indiscriminate acceptance
of it with all its natural accretions, I am persuaded there is a
position, which approves itself to the reason of man and his spiritual
instinct as well. It is the position of Christ Himself in relation to
the past. His attitude was one of wise criticism. The teaching of
the New Testament, where it may be said to teach anything on the
subject, is to prove all things. Assent without proof is no more
to be commended, than dissent without reason, and is equally mis-
chievous to the individual. The mere external adhesion to a thing,
no matter how good that thing be in itself, can never extract the

™

330 REASON AND REVELATION.

goodness from it. The contrary resnlt is more usual. It for ever
prevents such beneficent effects. Only by incorporating the good,
through its realisation in ourselves, and making former experiences
our own by living them, do they ever become a personal possession.
This, in the case before us, can hardly ever come to pass bo long as
Christianity is uncritical and spiritual consent merely nominal. An
uninquiring soul is no more likely to be enriched by the preserved
treasures of other souls in former times, than an uninquiring mind
by that accumulated wealth of the past to which the philosophic
temperament falls heir. You must prove your title to both, and
to each in the same way, viz., by experience. It is of very little
moment in the mental history of the mass of mankind that Socrates
or Plato, that Shakspeare or Goethe, lived and taught. It is the
prime moment in the history of all thinkers. The mass, however,
reveres these great teachers, and cherishes their memories, and pro-
bably purchases their works ; but it is a reverence and a regard that
spring not from individual knowledge and conviction, but from mere
hearsay and convention.

Christendom does very much the same with the representative
lives in its sphere as civilisation with the representative lives in
the sphere of culture, and on very much the same grounds. The
crowd pays most laudable homage, as it thinks, to the Founder and
leaders of the new kingdom ; their utterances are regarded -with a
sort of awe and reverential worship that paralyse thought and
criticism, and leave room only for absorbing adoration. And yet,
the record of Christ and His teaching, as a constant moment in the
spiritual life of the masses of Christendom, is at times scarcely
appreciable.* Whatever influence it has upon them is like the
influence of the great thinkers I have mentioned, secondary and
derivative merely. Thus far the parallel is as complete as parallels
usually are, but it will not admit of being drawn to its full limits
The untutored masses of modern culture feel, when they reflect upon
the matter at all, that their perception of Plato and the others is
defective, and that their regard for them is based merely on, what
they consider, competent external authority, and not on the internal
witnessing of their own mind, so to say. Accordingly, they cheer-
fully give place to men who have made these masters their study,
and who, in study, have acquired their method, and thoughts, and

* It may sound strange to some, but I am persuaded that Christianity has yet
to be expounded. Its social influence is a thing of the future.

THE P08ITI0N OP THE BIBLE IN RELIGIOUS LIFE. 331

drunk deeply of that more subtle influence which we call their spirit
— who hare lived over again the master's thoughts, pondered them
frequently, until they have become their own as well.

The unspiritualised masses* of modern Christendom behave in an
exactly contrary manner. They, too, in reality ground their respect
for the Scripture revelation on authority external to themselves —
the authority of tradition in one shape or another, and not on
intimate personal experience and a genuine vital assimilation of its
spirit and teaching, which is the only legitimate test of its doctrines,
as well as the only mode of acquiring any knowledge of them
worthy of the name. But, so far from yielding to those who have
thus known the mind of Christ, the philistian spirit of Christendom,
for the phrase is fully more applicable in this connection than in the
sphere of culture, claims for its perception of scriptural truth a
degree of exactness which, in the parallel case, would plainly appear
to themselves, as it does to others, to be wholly unfounded. This
would be a matter altogether unworthy of notice did it end here.
But the masses sometimes enforce their claims as the true inter-
preters of a spiritual life which they have not experienced but only
heard of, and at the same time disown, and in many cases repress,
those who in their own spirits have lived this life, and are alone able
and worthy to be its expositors. This traditionary extreme has had a
most fatal influence on the development of Christian life and thought.
The life has been dwarfed to a degree that, after eighteen hundred
years' growth, is perfectly amazing. The thought has been blighted,
and nearly killed. For long there was no thought properly and
distinctively Christian, and at present among ourselves, when it
shows itself, it is sickly, and apologetic for its intrusion, and, often
as not, forced to retreat underground, being nipped because of its
untimely shooting, or, what is the same thing, because of the un-
genial atmospheric influences that press upon the tender exhibition
of hidden vitality. The contemplation of these feeble efforts at growth
and of their unfriendly reception Alls one with much pity and pain,

* It is a very usual thing to charge one, who makes any reflection on classes
of men as being without spiritual life and light, with spiritual arrogance, and
especially with want of charity ; but really the charge may sometimes be with-
out reason. Those who make it have no hesitation in reflecting on larger classes
as defective in culture and ignorant, which may be no less arrogant and un-
charitable. A man of spiritual culture, I hold, feels when he is in the vicinity
of spiritual darkness just as keenly as a man of literary or scientific culture is
conscious of the proximity of ignorance.

332 REASON AND REVELATION.

while it serves, at the same time, to convince one of the hardy germ
of thought that lies somewhere inextinguishable, notwithstanding
the nntowardness of its surroundings. This is nowhere else than in
the spirit of that book, which, whether or not we may extend and
help to complete, we can never entirely or to any great extent super-
sede. The attempt and the strong desire to deprive modern life and
culture of the lessons that the Bible still has for ns, is a not very un-
natural consequence of the extreme traditionary manner of regarding
it. Life in the present day is anything but frivolous and speculative ;
it is intensely earnest and practical. A man of any seriousness and
sense of reality views with impatience a lazy leaning towards a past
that has no manifest continuity with the life within him and around
him ; and traditionalism, which has assumed the name and all the
external marks of Christianity, presents to his mind the excess of this
backward attitude. Unhappily he does not always inquire for himself
into the rights of the question, or, inquiring, is met by opposition
and general execration, and as unhappily retires from contact with
a cause with so unfortunate a following. But the man must have
faith of some kind. He must still give utterance to the life within
him, his spirit pants for an atmosphere in which to live and work,
for in work is its life, and not in dull quiescence and comfortable
entry into another's labours.

Thus arises the new faith with its conceptions of the common
good, and its manful labours to get this by legislation and social
amelioration of various kinds. A very noble faith, making ignoble
much that passes for the old faith. It is a real thing and personal
to a man — not merely conceptional for us in the present day, while
actually belonging to men long since dead. It has an element sus-
ceptible of growth. Development, advancement, progress are its
watchwords. And what ravishment does there not lie in such words
for an energetic man filled with benevolence, burning with love for
his fellow-men, consumed with the desire for their improvement ?
It is freedom itself and a kind of elemental existence for such a soul.
But, to be in a sphere where growth has entirely ceased, where the
watchwords are tradition and retrogression, is, to such a spirit as I
have now spoken of, slavery itself with the clogging of aspiration
and the stifling of life, that are ever the accompaniments of any kind
of bondage. Who can wonder at some breaking loose from such
conditions ? I regret this sort of severance, both for the sake of
the men and for the interests of society, as much as any one, but
without being surprised at it. Every one must equally regret the

THB POSITION OF THE BIBLE IN RELIGIOUS LIFE. 333

circumstances in modern Christian life that are, beyond question, the

occasion of this severance. There is much in the new faith that is.

undoubtedly good. The same thing cannot always be said for the

crass traditionalism that has given birth to it. If this traditionalism

were the natural outcome of the old faith, there would be little to

be said about it. We could quietly drop a thing that had, by

natural laws, proved itself obsolete, and lay hold on what, by the

same laws, approved itself to the necessities of the times. If it is

the case that on the heels of the past, —

" a fresh perfection treads,
A power more strong in beauty,"

we would not be true to ourselves, we would hardly be true to much
that, in Christianity, impels to the perfection of oar nature, did we
not attach ourselves to this new power, and force from it this Divine
strength.

There is " a fresh perfection " which traditionalism disclaims, and
which the new faith misinterprets. The new faith imagines this per-
fection to be the creature of the times, the child of circumstances
merely, having no legitimate connection with the old. It does not
see that it is actually u born " of it, nor does traditionalism see that
the very conception of Christianity presupposes such a birth. There is
entire agreement between the two great parties of Christendom in a
recognition of the new facts. The party of progress and the party of
order here can only be formed into hostile ranks, as they are formed
everywhere else, when the connection of the new facts is sought.

The new faith and the old in the spiritual sphere have their
counterpart in every sphere of thought and experience. We shall
not go out of our way to show the grounds of attachment that natu-
rally lead some to the old and others to the new. It is an interesting
but a wide field of psychological inquiry, dealing with the natural
idiosyncrasies and acquired tendencies of character, rather than with
questions of evidence in favour of the two positions. My subject is
simpler than this, if not so attractive, and consists, not in showing
why such sides are taken, but what position (I would not say side)
should be taken in a given instance. It is rarely, if ever, — I may
say it never happens, — that a side is the true position. It is neither
true to facts, nor, what is in the end a most important matter for
the individual, is it the standpoint from which a fair and full know-
ledge of all the facts can be obtained. It is the worst point of ob-
servation. There is excessive refraction without any means of
calculating the angle. Popular opinion is always ranged on sides

V

334 SEASON AND REVELATION.

and moves in a mass, because it is under the sway of feeling.
Sympathy and, if you will, prejudice drive it to the ranks of a parti-
cular party. It is for ever rendered incapable of knowing its own
side truly, and is under constant temptation, which sometimes be-
comes irresistible, of misunderstanding its opponents. As certain as
the feelings move with the one side they move against the other, and
in equally ordered phalanx. For drilled mechanical performances
the spectacle is not without interest. As the movements of reasonable
beings, there is a sad kind of humour in it. The demagogue appeals
with certain success to the crowd in the name of personal freedom —
the rights of individual reason ; and the success is certain, because
neither freedom nor reason have place in the excited mob, welded
together by a massive feeling which may, or may not, have a reason-
able origin.

The position and true point of view on the question before us lies
neither on the side of the new faith nor on that of traditionalism, but
somewhere between them. It avoids traditionalism by a wise criti-
cism of the past and a living reception of its principles into the new
forms of social and individual existence, as distinguished from an on-
inquiring acceptance and a merely mental conception of its doc-
trines. It keeps clear of the extravagance of the new faith, by
founding its spiritual life and its idea of it on the experiences of the
spiritual consciousness of former times, but without resting on these
experiences as traditionalism does. To put it in another form, the
tendency of traditionalism in this matter is to an historical relation
with past spiritual life, and that of the new faith to, what it would
call, a mythical relation, while pure Christianity is opposed to both
in being a vital relation. I say pure Christianity, that is Christianity,
as we see it represented in Christ Himself and His immediate fol-
lowers. And their representation is that of the greatest spiritual
intelligences in Judaism. The men of deepest spiritual insight, of
most intimate relation with the Spirit of Jehovah, and who did most
to cultivate the spiritual consciousness among the Jews, were alike
opposed to traditionalism and to anything that might, in their time,
exist resembling the new faith of the 19th century.* Thus, they

* The essential principle of the new faith is old enough, and, in fact, so far
we know, always existed. It is the assertion of the visible, as opposed to the in-
visible ; the acceptance of sensible relations, as opposed to, and exclusive of, those
that are spiritual. I know the pure, if not the spurious, professors of this faith
will take no offence, as I certainly do not intend any, when I say further, that
the principle of the new faith is the postulation of law, as opposed to God.

I

t
I

(

y

THE POSITION OF THE BIBLE IN KEUOIOU8 LIFE. 335

corrected, with the same faithfulness and severity, tendencies both
to ritualism and external ceremonies as well as lapses into unbelief
and denial of Jehovah, with the view of keeping constantly before |

the nation the great facts of a spiritual life, and aiding in per- J

fecting this in individual members of the commonwealth. These
leaders of the spiritual consciousness were by no means men raised '

up to repeat the teaching of former teachers, although they did
this also. They were themselves gifted with a new message. They
appeared with a Divine mission. They felt impelled to utter the
new spiritual truths that were burning within them. There is
nothing resembling a rehearsal from memory in these energetic and
vigorous utterances of individual experience. Whatever in the past
is good and appropriate to the circumstances, is repeated and en-
forced, even as is done by us in other matters at the present day.

Reform has not, even in its advanced modern expressions, under*
taken such thorough measures as these ancient speakers for Jehovah
advocated. The new faith has borrowed its watchwords of advance-
ment and progress from these great moral and spiritual reformers. So
profound was their conception of this natural tendency in the human
spirit, so assured were they of the ultimate triumph of the true and '

the good in the perfection of our race-, that their look naturally be-
came a forward one, as I have already pointed out, and they them-
selves became best known as prophets — speakers of what is yet to
be, as seers — discerning, from their own lofty spiritual position the
march of righteousness to final victory over evil. They kept a firm
hold on the past, only, however, to raise themselves to a higher level
in the future. But it was on what was true in the past, and not on
what was false. Never on the false could they have reared the
future of which they were so certain. It was because of their wise
criticism of the past that advancement was possible. Without this,
the future would merely be a sinking deeper and deeper in the mire
of a traditionalism, out of which no spiritual prophecies ever could
come.

This goes far to explain why the priests, as a class, are distinct
from the prophets, and often opposed to them. The priestly spirit
everywhere is invariably opposed to the prophetic, to life and ad-
vancement, because of its bondage to the graveclothes of traditional-
ism. Criticism first, removal of abuses, then progression from the
nucleus of truth, round which these abuses had accumulated, charac-
terise, on the contrary, the prophetic spirit. We never see the
Hebrew prophets, for example, accept these abuses, nor proceed

*1

( 336 REASON AND BE V ELATION.

f

from themselves, and out of relation to the truth of the past They
would have found no common bond of sympathy with the nation in
snoh measures, nor could they have been, what they represented
themselves to. be, Jehovah's servants, had they thus ignored former
spiritual revelations. The progress here, as elsewhere, must hare
continuity in it. So they dig into the sediment of tradition,
which had actually crystallised itself on certain spiritual truths.
Tradition must always have such a centre, and this centre may be
found by diligent search. The prophets, accordingly, dig into this
and remove it as refuse, and lay bare the fact beneath. " To what
purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices unto Me P saith the Lord:
I am full of the burnt offerings of rams and the fat of fed beasts;
and I delight not in the blood of bullocks, or of lambs, or of he-
goats." What lies under this accretion of tradition the prophet
proves to be : " Wash you, make you clean ; put away the evil of
your doings from before Mine eyes ; cease to do evil ; learn to do
well; seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless,
plead for the widow." On this it is possible to advance to further
spiritual manifestations, and to build up a spiritual consciousness in
the people, which is only bounded in its progress by a vision of a
time when " judgment shall dwell in the wilderness, and righteous-
ness remain in the fruitful field. And the work of righteousness
shall be peace ; and the effect of righteousness quietness and assur-
ance for ever" — a time "when the people shall be all righteous."
Traditionalism never could dream of this, far less live and speak as
if it saw it in the near future, and unflinchingly, against all prejudice
and popular inclination, work for its attainment.*

But why should I prove this ? The position of modern iradi-
tionalism itself is, that within the Old Testament and the New
there is development, an onward growth and purification of the
idea of God, as well as of the spiritual consciousness to which the
revelation is manifested — a growth, during some periods, hardly per-
ceptible, but again in others stimulated by the advent of men of God
to a fuller unfolding, until in Christ it attains maturity, and, at the

* The story of Noah, the early preacher of righteousness, and the ark, may
perhaps contain a hidden allusion to some such struggle between him and hi*
contemporaries. His preserving not only a righteous seed on the earth, but
also animala of every kind, looks perplexing. If we consider, however, the near
connection in a Jewish mind between righteousness and well-being, this incident
will not appear quite so strange. A good deal must, of course, be allowed for the
drapery of the story in explaining some of the minor details.

THE POSITION OF THE BIBLE IN RELIGIOUS LIFE. 337

same time, a self-consciousness and calm mastery that could only be
found in One who revealed the Father, because He was one with
Him, as He Himself says, and not merely fitfully in communion
with Him. This self-possession and true proportion of the prophetic
spirit are manifested not only in a fuller present revelation of the
Divine, but, preliminary to that, in a wise criticism of the past,
from which alone this fuller revelation with its clearer future out-
look can spring. Priests did not escape His rebuke. He did not
hesitate to comment upon an ordinance of Moses. Traditionalism
and practical unbelief had never before known a more sternly un-
compromising enemy. " Leave all and follow Me," is His one an-
swer to men burdened in any way, whether with money or prejudices.
A needful answer and the only true starting point, as may after-
wards be seen, for those who would enter the new kingdom and be-
come its citizens, and thereby become like Him who is like God.

We are not to suppose, however, that Christ, any more than the
early prophets, was a blind iconoclast. The prophets, as I have
already pointed out, never interrupted the true succession of genuine
spiritual revelation, by the destruction of the work of former seers.
There is an ordered thought, and frequently a course of spiritual
conception, taken up by later prophecy, and repeated, and enlarged,
but never subverted. We find primitive manifestations gradually
broadening with the developing spiritual consciousness. Christ dis-
tinctly says that He came not to destroy the law or the prophets.
The conception, that His mission was destructive of the past, is not
dependent on this direct statement for its contradiction. The whole
course of His life and teaching yield an absolutely opposite conclu-
sion. He needed, as much as the prophets, the past to work upon.
The development of spiritual ideas, and the corresponding evolution
of the spiritual consciousness throughout the past, formed the neces-
sary platform of His operations. They were, what the Bible calls,
the fulness of the times ; the religious expression of a patent enough
social fact in Judaism. His aim, therefore, was not to destroy but
to fulfil. Whenever a fitting occasion presents itself, He first refers
to these utterances of His forerunners, either as a basis for further
upbuilding of the Divine idea, or as an ultimate answer to a definite
question. A lawyer, to whom I previously had occasion to refer,
came to Him and asked, What shall I do that I may inherit eternal
life ? Christ does not seek to disturb the man's moral and intel-
lectual training by answering the question, probably, of his life in
some strange and entirely novel manner. He does not profess to

z

1

338 BEASON AND REVELATION.

have a new revelation on the point, bat refers the man to the past :
" What is written in the law ? how readest thon ? " The lawyer
is well enongh versed in the law to give the answer. Only what is
necessary to complete the answer does Christ supply to the ancient
Divine utterance : Do this, and you shall not only know how yon
may inherit eternal life, but you shall now have that life.

That is an exemplification of Christ's method and mission, which He
formulates as not a subversion of the past, but a fulfilment of what
was true and Divine in it. If He had absolutely new doctrines to
propound, and it is not necessary to suppose that He had, in order to
prove His superiority to all who preceded Him, He does not bring
them always to the front, but appears rather to be anxious to unfold
old truths, to widen obsolete doctrines, to put a life into the dry
bones of the current beliefs of His time.* The sequel of the inter-
view, to which I have alluded, shows this much more vividly, than
any remarks of mine can do. The lawyer is desirous to justify him-
self, as a questioner on a matter which he knows, by further asking,
Who is my neighbour P This question was a subject of great in-
terest to the mind of the scribes of Christ's day, and before His time.
Interpreters of the law had wasted much logic in trying to settle the
limitations of this phrase, in accordance with their literalism* Who
is my neighbour P might, for anything we know, be what is now
called a test question, or equivalent to an article of belief among the
then religious sects. It is fully as practical and vital as articles with

* Some men, with more diligence than insight, have put Christ's utterances in
parallel columns with similar, or nearly similar statements, in the Old Testament
and apocryphal writings, for the purpose of dwarfing His position in the spirited
sphere. While doing so, they generally overlook nicer shades of difference between
the two contrasted statements, and the relative prominence of truths in each;
bnt what is the most important point, they forget that the life of a spiritual bemg
is infinitely more valuable than his utterances — that in moral and spiritual beings
the life is all in all. Christ's oral discourses are not very extensive, the charm, if
I may say so, of His personality has been proved to be as universal and diffusive as
sunlight. Living a truth is above all speaking about it. Our greatest men are
not necessarily our greatest writers or speakers. I believe they are only rarely
such. Milton, who was both great, and wrote great things, gives the true order
of greatness as well as the definition of the word. " He alone is worthy of the
appellation [great] who either does great things, or teaches how they may be
done, or describes them with a suitable majesty when they have been done ; tact
those only are great things, which tend to render life more happy, which increase
the innocent enjoyments and comforts of existence, or which pave the way to
a state of future bliss, more permanent and more pure." By such a test Christ
has been tried, and His influence has been felt through the greatness so eloqnentlT
described by Milton.

THE POSITION OF THE BIBLE IN RELIGIOUS LIFE. 339

which we are all familiar. Christ was, no doubt, aware of the de-
batings,the arguments and counter arguments, the mental mist and
confusion that had settled round this point. There had sprung up an
entire literature on the subject ; just as we have our technical litera-
ture on very nice points. But the definitions of the theologians had
been, as they not unfrequently are still, singularly unsatisfactory and
contradictory. The law doubtless, to a single-minded spiritual man,
appeared clear and explicit enough in its teaching concerning neigh-
bourly love. Clearness, however, is not what the genuine theologian
likes best, and so he sqeks through a metaphysical process to escape,
probably without intention, the spirit of the command. Christ, as
was His wont, sweeps away all these cobwebs,* and by a picture
sketched on the spot where they stood — a picture showing at once
the highest art, the finest insight into life, the keenest appreciation of
nature, the deepest knowledge of man — He sets this vexed question
of the Jewish doctors in no shadowy light. What fine havoc does
not the inimitable story of the good Samaritan make of their great
subtleties ! He first directs a delicate irony against the theory of
the learned men, and then exhibits, with a tenderness as delicate, the
meaning of neighbour to, what He would call, the single-eyed man.
Never, perhaps, was a sarcastic weapon handled so skilfully, never
was an arrow sent home with truer aim. Was ever richer comfort,
nobler doctrine sent to man ? Yet it is the teaching of the law.
The picture of the Samaritan, which we have all seen from infancy
hanging in our homes, and the reflection of which we have carried
in our hearts from childhood, is considered the true note of Chris-
tianity. It appears to sum up all that is best in its spirit. But,
the ancient books of the Jews contained the very same sentiment,
and others besides, as full of, what we call, Christian kindliness.
From Sinai their forefathers had heard kindness, and compassion,
and universal love enjoined. The voice that thundered out the law
had also whispered, " Thou shalt neither vex a stranger nor oppress
him. ... If thou meet thine enemy's ox or his ass going astray,
thou shalt surely bring it back to him again." And what litera-
ture of any country, or any time, can equal the passage in Job xxix.,f

* We need Hie spirit, which, by doing a like thing for us, will lead us into all
truth.

t " When the ear heard me, then it blessed me ; and when the eye saw me
it gave witness to me : because I delivered the poor that cried, and the father-
less, and him that had none to help him. The blessing of him that was ready
to perish came upon me : and I caused the widow's heart to sing for joy. . . .

z 2

^

340 REASON AND REVELATION.

where the poet unveils tons a soul moved by infinite tenderness
and pity towards the poor and distressed ?

But, although the same truth underlies both Testaments, there is
a widening of application from the Old to the New. No abstract
teaching could so well have helped a Jew of Christ's day, or so well
aid us of the present day, if we exercise any historical sense we
have, to appreciate the growth and expansion of the idea and feel-
ing of neighbourliness from Moses to Christ, as the selection of a
Samaritan for the pattern and type of the ideal neighbour. This was
Christ's positive contribution to an older truth. His negative and
critical attitude preceded this. Traditionalism had been working on
the old revelation, and its work must be undone. He, accordingly, set
the leaders of the current conceptions to dramatise their speculations
in that lonely mountain scenery between Jerusalem and Jericho.
The scenery was sterile enough, but not more forbidding than the
spirits of the actors. When dramatised, their speculations appeared
worse than ludicrous, they were profane. In a similar way I have
sometimes dramatised to myself, and made as concrete as I was
able, some speculations in theology of somewhat later date, the im-
mediate effect of which on my mind, however salutary in the end,
was anything but pleasing.

The story of the good Samaritan has many lessons for us. It
exhibits the general method of handling spiritual themes which Christ
practised, in contrast to the quasi-scientific method of interpreters
and commentators in all times. It also shows us how plain and
simple to an enlightened spiritual consciousness in union with the
Divine was a riddle, that had puzzled the doctors of the law ; with
how clear a vision He could look on the leading principles of our
spiritual nature, whose meat it was do His Father's will ; how far
above all intellectual knowledge* of a thing is living it ; how clear

I was eyes to the blind, and feet was I to the lame. I was a father to the poor ;
and the cause which I knew not I searched out."

* Intellectual knowledge is very often spoken of as if it were wholly an
unmixed good, whereas it is on some occasions anything but this. It is an
attempt to state experience of some sort or another, and always a more or less
inadequate representation of such experience ; at best partial, disjointed, and
sometimes so much so, as to be positively false. In order that it may become
a good, we should recognise its limits. Where we fail to do this, mere in-
tellectual knowledge is almost certain to prove ultimately injurious to our
nature as a whole, in hindering the due expansion of its complex parts, and
thereby standing in the way of the enlargement of our acquaintance with the
sum of things.

s.

THE POSITION OF THE BIBLE IN RELIGIOUS LIFE. 341

£ z . a head comes from a large, well acting, loving heart. The purpose

for which we notice the story here is to illustrate Christ's position

to the spiritual life and literature of His time, as one of criticism

j. and advance. The absence of any philosophical theory, or even of

. hints for the formation of a theory, concerning the nature of the

', old revelation and its record, is characteristic of the whole teach-

ing of Jesus. The official teachers of His day had, on the other

hand, as we have seen cause to believe, what our stricter theology

would call thoroughly exact notions about the sacredness of their

canonical Scriptures, down probably to their words and letters. But

we have no difficulty in perceiving from His manner of meeting

their opinions and speaking of their lives, that, in their theorisings

^ on the channel of revelation, they had not come very close to the

k * revelation itself, but, on the contrary, had wandered further from

tt the influence of its living power. The distinctive spirit of Christ's

-■' teaching, as compared with that of the recognised interpreters of

a ' the time, consists in its practical indifference to theory about the

,ff conveyance of Divine truth. It is, thus, that questions, which were

ai of prime importance to the lawyers and the scribes, were utterly

* insignificant to Him. He betrays impatience with all such. Great
:: spiritual truths and leading ideas — the spiritual life power in the

Old Testament Scriptures is all with which He concerns Himself.

* As we have seen in one crucial example, He first seeks to dispel the
~ fog that may have gathered round any truth, by removing it alto-
t gether from the halls of learning, where so much of that atmosphere
' is generated, and thereafter clothes it anew in flesh and blood. He

has no consideration for mere dialectic skill, that spins its theories
from the material supplied by an abnormal brain, but with an
amazing freedom and wide open look, which those that name them-
selves with His name have rarely acquired, He sees things as they
really are, not as the schools or recognised intellectual guides repre-
sent them ; and it is for this reason that His utterances come to us
fresh and true, as reflected from a mind undisturbed by prejudice,
and mirroring the Divine in the deep of its translucent soul. It is
from the higher regions, in which He continually moves, that He is
able to discern the abiding among the transient, in the sacred books of
His countrymen — that He escapes the confusion between the letter
and the spirit, — lessons which the ancient prophets taught by their
free quotations from former seers, in which they were careful only of
the principle involved in vision or doctrinal utterances, and little
mindful of subsidiary matters. The quotations were made, not out

V

312 REASON AND REVELATION.

of empty respect for their predecessors, and to confirm their Divine
mission, but to add to, and develop, the spiritual truth of former
days. Their view of Scripture was not the view that is too common,
and which Bacon may have had in his mind when he says : " What-
soever knowledge cannot at all work upon, and convert, is a mere
intoxication, and endangereth a dissolution of mind and spirit."

The prophets, and all true speakers for God, regard the past ex-
periences of men likeminded with themselves, as something to work
upon, not to rest in. Had this not been the case, the prophets
would have been like the rest of the nation, idly settling down in a
complacent and ignorant worship of the externals of revelation;
and Judaism, instead of being the cultivator of spiritual truth, and
the seedbed of, what has been called, the God-consciousness, would
have hardened into traditionalism, which it very often did in the
intermediate periods of great prophetic excitation. Instead of
growth of mind and spirit in Divine things, which is its character
as a whole, there would have been disintegration and ultimate decay.
I have no idea that the conditions of spiritual vitality are in this
respect, at least, different from those of a physical or mental life.
The alternative, in all cases, is progression or degeneracy. In Judaism
itself the principle is plainly seen at work. When the true prophetic
spirit had attained its highest level in individuals, the nation at
large, and notably individuals in it, had sunk so far as to " seek unto
them that have familiar spirits and unto wizards that peep and
mutter."* It was men like Isaiah who, with profound respect for
the past, built upon an intelligent insight into the true and false
which it contained, cut himself off from the traditionalism that pre-
served ancient practices simply because they were ancient, without
considering whether they were true and Divine, or merely the neces-
sary concomitants of a primitive spiritual culture. These admix-
tures of error he flung from him, but only to cling more tenaciously
to the truth that lay beneath them. This he found to be intercourse
with, and knowledge of, God. " Shall not a people seek unto their
God P " There is a growing clearness of spiritual vision, and an
ncreasing calmness of utterance in this period as compared with the
confusion and relative turgidity of the earlier seers. This growth is
confined largely, however, like all inner growth everywhere, to the
choice spirits in Judaism. The multitude as usual lived some cen-
turies behind their leaders. So keenly did the advanced spiritual in-

j

* Isa. yiii. 19.

THE POSITION OF THE BIBLE IN RELIGIOUS LIFE. 343

telligences feel the backwardness of the masses, that we find them
compelled to denounce those, who, under the mask of prophets, minis-
tered to their superstition and ignorance. " Let not jour prophets and
your diviners, that be in the midst of you, deceive you, neither hearken
to your dreams which ye cause to be dreamed."* " And it shall come
to pass that when any shall yet prophesy, then his father and his mother
that begat him shall say unto him, Thou shalt not live ; for thou
speakest lies in the name of the Lord."f " Israel," says Ezekiel
(xiii. 4, 6), " thy prophets are like the foxes in the deserts ; . . . they
have seen vanity and lying divination, saying, The Lord saith : and
the Lord hath not sent them." Here and throughout Old Testa-
ment history we have abundant illustration of the outcome of tradi-
tionalism in Divine things, on the one hand, and, on the other, of the
result of an enlightened spiritual consciousness, that can discern the
wheat from the chaff. Native impoverishment of heart and life, and
a dead standstill or backward movement, inevitably accompany the
former ; enrichment from the past, and inspiration to farther ad-
vancement, are the inevitable consequences of the latter.

It was the prevalence of this wise criticism among the ruling spirits
in Judaism that made Christ possible, and led up to Him who is its
flower and fruit. The flower and fruit of Judaism become, how-
ever, the seed of Christianity, a fact that is never to be forgotten.
The statement is Christ's, not mine, and history has confirmed its
truth. Fructifying in Judoa, the seed has been scattered far and
wide. It found a lodgement in Paul's spirit and conditions of growth
there, — a good soil, as Christ says. The evidence of this we have in
the new growing life of the man, when he had been lifted out of the
stagnation of traditional Judaism. Never did the seed find a more
congenial set of conditions. Hear how he expresses his relation to
the past and the future. It is the race, with its impressive energy
of the whole man, that can alone picture this — the race with its firm
footing on the receding distances to render its eager grasping of the
untraversed course more sure and certain. " I count not myself to
have apprehended : but this one thing I do : forgetting those things
which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are
before, I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of
God in Christ Jesus. "J That is the legitimate action of Christ's
spirit upon the human consciousness. This picture, we know, will
by some be confined to the straining after a perfect spiritual life and

* Jer. xxix. 8. t Zech. xiii. S. { Phil. iii. 13, 14.

344 REASON AND REVELATION.

likeness to Christ. Such perfection and likeness, however, are in-
separable from an inward growth of spiritual perception, and in-
creased apprehension of Divine things. Knowledge and life are only
different names for the same thing. That this is really the meaning
of St. Paul in this place will be seen by reference to the previous
course of his thought. " I count all things bat loss . . . that I
may know Him and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship
of His sufferings, being made conformable unto His death." Know-
ledge and life are, with Paul, as they were with Christ and all the
greater spiritual natures of the Old and New Testament, co-relative.
In Christ's words, which are as applicable to this as to any other
aspect of Christian life, " no man having put his hand to the plough,
and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of Grod." The movement is
forward. Again and again, advancement is urged upon all. We are
entreated to go on unto perfection.

It might be shown, in fact, that the progress in many spheres of
activity, which is so characteristic a feature of modern life, has its
origin, or, at least, one of its greatest forces, in the primal impulse
of the spirit of Christianiiy . A movement in social life is rarely con-
fined within its original limits, but extends itself to modes of activity
outside these. Increased political activity, for example, will react
upon literature, and a new-born energy in literary life will manifest
itself in the religious sphere, and vice versa. It may sometimes hap-
pen, as it happened in the instance above alluded to, that the impulse
is operative in the conditions into which it has been translated, for
a long time after it has ceased, or been weakened, in those in which
it was native. This is partly owing to a favourable concurrence of
circumstances in the former case, and partly to the later introduction
of the impulse, as a factor in these conditions. At any rate, the
Christian life, as a mode of perceiving the Divine, of enlarging our
experience of spiritual verities, and strengthening our powers of
living and knowing, and in this way contributing to the spiritual
treasures of the past which have come down to us, has fallen far
behind the industrial life and scientific life in these respects. It has
fallen so low, in fact, that it recognises its lapsed position as neces-
sary and natural, and has no desire to rise. It has an extreme
aversion to anything or anybody, that suggests the possibility of an
upward movement. Progress is inevitable in industrial and scientific
pursuits, and men bend themselves to it with as much joy and passion
as Paul did to the spiritual race. But to strain after progress in the
Divine life gives them much the same sensation, as it would give a

THE POSITION OF THE BIBLE IN BELIGIOU8 LIFE. 345

paralytic man to try a foot race. Prolonged disuse has had its natural
consequences, in enfeebling the faculties. The rudiments of them,
no doubt, are there, but it requires a psychology of an extremely
incisive kind to discover them ; and the uninquiring man denies the
conclusion of the investigator using such means, and appeals to his
own experiences. But he never had any experiences himself. He
lives upon the experiences of men who lived long ago. Traditional-
ism stands before the spiritual, as men in the earliest times stood
before the natural world, with awe and terror in their hearts. The
result of this mythical stage of humanity on mental growth and
power of observation, on advancement in science and general well-
being, has been already characterised. Criticism had not awakened,
and advancement could not proceed without it. Instead of this, myth
crowded on myth and overlaid the natural truth, so as to render it
almost inextricable. Traditionalism now and then received a shock
by the advent of a genuine natural philosopher, who did some good
destructive work, and, to the pure result of rational observation in
the past, added his own intelligent conclusions. A period of tradi-
tionalism intervened, or rather, its temporary overthrow by the spirit
of criticism was followed by an ascendancy that was always more or
less widely acknowledged, and reason and truth had once more to
assert themselves. The battle has never ceased ; but it is not difficult
to see, at the point at which we have arrived, what the ultimate issue
will be. The conviction has been forced upon men, long before our
day, that truth will prevail. It is this conviction that has given
nerve to those who bore its banners, when bearing them was not so
safe a post of duty as it is now.

There has followed in spiritual life, from an attitude towards the
Bible similar to that of primitive intelligences towards nature, similar
results in spiritual growth, in capacity for truthful observation and
progress in Divine knowledge. The mythical stage, in the intellectual
life, is, in the main, left behind, and has become a matter of history.
We are at this moment, however, leading a mythical spiritual life.
The fear, and exaggerated feeling of dread — I can hardly call it
reverence, for we can never feel too profound a reverence before
either nature or the record of the spiritual experiences of other men
— with which we approach our Bible and its teaching involuntarily
recall to us the terror that nature at first inspired. Investigation,
in the true sense of that term, is suspended on biblical subjects, for
our eyes, as Christ says, are holden, and a reasonable spiritual appre-
hension is impossible to us. We have instead myth piled on myth,

346 REASON AND REVELATION.

with an element of Divine truth, which is, however, almost wholly
nndiscernible ; and this phantasmagoria of the spiritual imagination
receives all but universal respect, — I cannot quite say belief. Kos-
mical mythology maintained its hold on the popular esteem, for a
long time after the majority had ceased actually to believe it 9
Mnch of this spiritual mythology is comprised in what is called
dogmatic theology, and a very great deal of it is to be found in
creeds and confessions. These are at present very much in a mytho-
logical position. They have the impress of traditionalism, and are
wholly opposed to a wise criticism. Their successive additions are
not the outcome of living personal spiritual observation and expe-
rience, but rather the logical sequence of earlier traditions. Their
development, as it is termed, is a development not of spiritual
truth or of the expression of its perception by the human spirit;
it is rather the expansion of theological mythology : for it is the na-
ture of myth to beget myth, as every one knows who has studied
the question. I know I shall be told, that kosmical mythology was
a poetic and imaginative product — that the theological myth is
logical and abstract. Both, indeed, take their shape and colouring
from the faculty, predominating at the period and in the places, in
which they take their rise. But, all the faculties are at work in each.
Imagination more or less, however, moulding the first, and logical
thought the second, but neither exclusively. Let any one examine
a confession of faith, for example, and he will find a highly pictorial
element underlying the abstract form of the document. It iB this,
indeed, that has given such documents their hold upon the public
mind.

I wish to note this consequence of any mythology, that it stands
to those who hold it, as the representation of fact, and, by its inter-
vention between them and the living realities of spiritual or. natural
objects, intercepts for the majority all possibility of true and face to
face perception of these realities. Kosmical mythology did this to
all but a few, and the postponement of pure science, the arts, and
the conveniences of material well-being was the result. Theological
mythology has done the same thing for generations in religions
experience, and the backward condition of the perception of spiritual
truth, and the little influence Christianity has on common life, are
traceable to this. Men do not go to the fountain ; they go merely

* This is well known to be the ease with very many at present in relation to
religious and theological questions.

j

THE POSITION OF THE BIBLE IN RELIGIOUS LIFE. 347

to certain streams. Some have not courage to go direct to the
source ; while others, from their position, and pledged as they are to
the mythology, dare not go beyond that mythology. Others again,
with perfect honesty, accept the present state of affairs, and have,
naturally enough, no wish to overturn that in which they believe.
Thus supported, and leaving out of consideration the powerful feel-
ings that may be called into action on a matter so momentous as that
of the spiritual life, traditionalism, with its satisfaction in the expe-
riences of other men as if they were its own experiences, seems more
than a match for a wise criticism, which, while respecting all truth
that the human spirit ever perceived, manifests its respect by prov-
ing the truth, and thereafter incorporating it into the sum of its
experiences, in order that it may add thereto.

Criticism in theology has I am aware a bad name. There is a
criticism, however, which, basing itself on entire acceptance of
Christ, and proceeding from the power of His life in the spirit of
man and from conscious communion with Him, and the feeling of
dependent help springing from that communion, is nowhere destruc-
tive, but everywhere reverently constructive. If a man can honestly
affirm, that Christ " is to him the ultimate certainty, for which he is
prepared gladly and unhesitatingly to hazard all other pretended
knowledge that may be opposed to it ; that he knows no other fixed
point on which he could cast the anchor for his whole human interest
and concern, and in particular for his thought, except the historical
fact which the sacred name of Jesus signifies : "* if a man occupies
ground like this, his treatment of the past will never be otherwise
than that of a wise criticism. This, however, it must be. No mere
traditionalism could satisfy such a spirit, any more than a coarse,
unsympathetic, and destructive criticism. Were it a matter of choice
between these two, I do not doubt for a moment that his leaning
would be decidedly towards the former, as truer to the spirit of his
Master and more appreciative of history. Christ did not break with
the past religious experiences of His countrymen. We find Him,
not in His youth merely, when He was presumably under the control
of His parents, in attendance at the temple service, but during His
public ministry He frequented the synagogues and public religious
assemblies, and appeared at the great national festivals in Jerusalem.
He dismisses a man whom He healed with the instruction : " offer
for thy cleansing, according as Moses commanded." His relation

♦ Rothe : " Theologische Ethik."

348 REASON AND REVELATION.

to the past is, however, a discriminative one, as it must be from
His critical and progressive standpoint. The apostles show that in
this, as in other matters they held Him as their pattern and example,
and endeavoured, in their dealings with the past, which the unfolding
of Christ's life and teaching rendered necessary, to follow in His
steps.

I may have appeared to some to have neglected the Master's
example, as well as that of His apostles, in my strictures on the creeds.
It was far from my intention to do any such thing. The remarks
were illustrative, and if the language seem to be unnecessarily
severe, or appear to betray a want of sympathy with former phases
of thought, and Christian activity, I must plead the urgency of the
occasion. Neither Christ nor His apostles were everywhere con-
siderate of what had been. Traditionalism, as I have already said,
had never such hard measure dealt out to it, even in prophetic times,
as it received from Christ. Censure and denunciation could not go
further. And the reason is plain. Directly traditionalism becomes
an incubus on life and thought consideration is out of the question,
and its true position must be assigned to it, even at the risk of much
apparent harshness and severity. If it is not possible, as it sometimes
is not, to breathe upon the dry bones and make them live, what other
way is left, than to grind them to powder, and get at what life-power
may remain in them, by scattering their dust upon a well tilled sofl
to stimulate the seed of fresh life that is ready to burst into the
light? If we cannot send the sap through dead dry sticks, and
make them trees and shrubs tremulous with life, we can apply fire
to them, and from their consumption extract heat for ourselves.*
And if men cry out upon us for our waste, surely we have bat trans-
formed the forces, not destroyed them. We have utilised them to
the very utmost, and would not even throw away the ashes of the fire
at which we warmed ourselves, but lay them reverently with the
bone dust, knowing, as we do, that there is virtue even in them. It
is not by any means the best use to keep them in the form of dry
bones or dead sticks; no good can come to those who preserve
them so. I do not say they were not once instinct with life ; they
would not have been either bones or sticks, unless as remains of life
once vigorous and beautiful. Now, it requires the Divine spark
within ourselves to kindle the Divine fire within them and make it

* Luther, no doubt, warmed himself and many others by a famous burning
of his.

THE POSITION OF THE BIBLE IN EELIGTOUS LIFE. 349

ours. It requires at least the seed of Divine life, which, meeting
whatever Divine stimulus is in them, may be brought to germination.
A wise criticism, accordingly, even when in its apparently severest
mood, never loses hold of the great principle of sympathetic ap-
preciation of the past — appreciation begotten of reverence and per-
sonal experience of all that is true to a genuine spiritual existence.
What is perishable in that past may decay — must decay, and no
living intelligence would seek either to hasten or hinder this by any
unnatural proceeding. With unerring instinct it feels for what is
imperishable among the perishable, and absorbs it as its life nourish-
ment. In all healthy growing natures these two processes of rejection
and assimilation go on together, the health and growth being de-
pendent as much on the vigour with which the first function is per-
formed, as on the energetic action of the last. And where there is
a fair amount of vitality, this repellent and attractive force will in
general, even in the spiritual sphere, have no tendency to any serious
deviation from the law of all true life, that is, if left to itself, and un-
influenced by arbitrary and conventional rules, it will throw off what-
ever is hurtful, and seek out and cherish whatever is helpful to its
maturity and full perfection. The growth of the human spirit,
having present and past before it, will search in both for the nutri-
ment of the soul, but not in the one more than in the other ; for time
is no element in truth, on which a man's soul must live. Centuries
cannot make it any more Divine. It is like God, the same yesterday,
to-day, and for ever. It is in this aspect of human experience that
the truth of the observation lies, that " history is an impertinence
and an injury, if it be anything more than a cheerful apologue and
parable of my being and becoming."

It is, thus, that the man enlightened with Christ's spirit must ap-
proach the past in the Bible. The imperishable exists in the contents
of that book, as nowhere else in the records of humanity, preserved
from age to age by men who had the spiritual life within them kindled,
and kept burning by the memories of preceding times, and who added
to these the revelations of Divine truth made to their own souls, thus
laying up in successive times that glorious spiritual treasure, whose
accumulated riches must for ever be the store for the needy spirit of
mankind. It is impossible to dispense with it ; if it were possible,
we would not.

If there is development and unfolding in Divine things, it must be
a progression that rises out of this past. All else is merely delusive.
The world of man's social and spiritual life resembles in this the

350 REASON AND REVELATION.

several eras in the formation of the material world; layer on layer
it lies, and the topmost crust is a deposit on some past accretion.
Geology is the philosophy of history applied to the phenomena of
matter. A religious life is not dead, as some would have us believe,
that looks to the past, as the awakener of its powers and the source
of their increasing growth. Death only supervenes, when that past
is thought to be for ever past, and not to be ever present in our
own life, which it may be. It is against this spiritual deadness and
scepticism, and the hindrance to the progress of Divine knowledge
produced thereby, that I am contending for such a vital acceptance
of that past, as will inevitably incite us to pass the limits which it
had reached, and enable us to give to those who come after us a
point of departure somewhat nearer the ultimate goal of all spiritual
effort, than we ourselves possessed. Otherwise I know not "why we
have any right to expect, as by our prayers we appear to anticipate,
God's kingdom to come and His will to be done on earth as it is in
heaven. I cannot see how, on any other ground, we are entitled to
pray with Paul, that we may be enabled increasingly to know God's
love. On no other supposition can I get any meaning out of one of
many promises made by Christ : " when He, the Spirit of truth, is
come, He will guide you into all truth." Are we to understand this
simply to mean, all the truth in the canonical Scriptures of the Old
Testament, and in the fragmentary utterances of Christ recorded in
the Gospels P Then, it is a very grandiloquent way of expressing a
very simple matter, and wholly unlike Christ's usual manner. Or
are we to suppose that this promise was made to His immediate fol-
lowers only, and not to those that should come after them P Then,
we stand in a different relation to former Divine revelations than did
Christ's immediate hearers, and the deliverance of Paul requires some
modification, that " whatsoever things were written aforetime were
written for our learning, that we through patience and comfort of the
scriptures might have hope." If there are only some things for us
and others for specially favoured men, what a difficulty does not such
a system of interpretation introduce ? The difficulty that may at
first sight be imagined tp lie in the " wise criticism " which I have
advocated, is nothing to it. For, in the purified spiritual conscious-
ness we have the Spirit of God bearing witness with the truth itself.
In the words of the Larger Catechism of the Scottish Kirk : " The
Spirit of God bearing witness by, and with, the Scripture in the
heart of man is alone able fully to persuade it, that the Scriptures
are the very word of God." In apportioning one set of truths in

I

THE POSITION OF THE BIBLE IN RELIGIOUS LIFE. 351

the word of God to one order of men, and another set to another, we
are left without any such witnessing Spirit. Paul has no such view
of former promises and experiences, but where they concern his life
and spiritual growth he eagerly seizes them for himself and his
hearers. The primitive record of the patriarch Abraham in its most
personal details is thus absorbed by the energetic spiritual life of
the man : "Now it was not written for his sake alone, that it was
imputed to him; but for us also, to whom it shall be imputed, if we
believe." And so it was not written for the apostles' sake alone,
that the spirit of truth should lead them into all truth, but for us
also who shall have the same guidance, if we believe. If we do not
believe, of course it is not ours ; no more would Abraham's experi-
ence have become Paul's own, if he had lot it lie a dead historic inci-
dent, out of all relation to him and his contemporaries. I imagine
some such position as this is laid down in the Second Epistle of
Peter, i. 20 : " No prophecy of the Scripture," this being a most evi-
dent form, and, therefore, general expression of Divine revelation,
"is of any private interpretation."*

We are accustomed to hear the present dispensation described, as
one of fuller revelation, than the Jewish. Undoubtedly it is so, but
the expression needs explanation. It cannot be applied with any-
thing like correctness when emphasised, as it usually is, merely in
connection with what I must call, the few fragments of literature
that have been added to tbe Old Testament record. If that is all
that underlies the expression — if it does not include primarily the
new spirit and life, and higher spiritual platform of Christian times
that are ours, as the inheritance of Christ's life and work, bringing
men nearer to God and God closer to men, — then, I consider that our
times, instead of being more highly favoured with a fuller revela-
tion, are, compared with the best days of Judaism, in spiritual dark-
ness. If the Jews did not see all that we have on record as seen in
later times, at least they saw for themselves what was revealed, and
not by proxy as we are content to do. They did not think that God
was straitened in them, and that " the secret f of the Lord," which

* Writing to the Corinthians, Paul says, "Now all these things happened
unto them for ensamples : and they are written for our admonition." And in
Timothy, "All Scripture ... is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for
correction, for instruction in righteousness ; " not some parts to this, and some
to that man, but " that the man of God may be perfect." Surely it is never
imagined by any one, that the apostles alone were to have an opportunity of
thus perfecting their nature.

t His counsel, intercourse.

352 REASON AND REVELATION.

was with them who feared Him, would only teach them better to
understand some text in their sacred books. It would do this abo,
as they experienced for themselves what the human spirit did, who
gives this picture of his inner life. Bnt its action transcended that,
and of necessity introduced them into clearer views of God, and
deeper relations of their spirit with His — into all truth, which no
one can say is held within the Bible.

Lead me in Thy truth and teach me ; show me Thy wayB ; teach

me Thy paths, — are not prayers simply to know what has been

written of God's ways, but to know these ways as they were yet to

be experienced, and recorded, by the devout Hebrew psalmist who

breathed the aspirations. And, after all that has been written since

his time, can any one say that the knowledge of these ways has been

exhausted ? Is it not nearer the truth to say, that these Divine paths

are being revealed in every age and to every man, who has his

spiritual vision purified to discern them P " Thy way is in the sea,

and Thy path in the great waters, and Thy footsteps are not known;"

these words do not sound as if the psalmist believed, that either he,

or the men before him, knew all that they could know about God.

If it really were the case, as theologians sometimes imagine it

to be, that spiritual manifestation were ended, and the unfolding

of God's love complete and final, there would, for a spiritually

minded man, be in such a conviction greater occasion for depression

and settled melancholy, than there could be in the belief that the

combination of musical sounds had been exhausted.* I hare to

learn, however, either that God has emptied Himself, or that man has

been filled with His fulness. Though it is true of Him, that in the

past He made known Himself at sundry times and in divers manners,

the present and the future are not, therefore, to be silent with

regard to Him. His way is from less to greater, not the reverse.

Have we not the principle in this very passage : God who thus

revealed Himself in times past unto the fathers, " hath in these

last days spoken unto us by His Son" ? And Christ's advent is bat

the beginning of a new era, not the summation of it as yet, unless

in the sense that in Him all fulness dwelt — a fulness, however, that

is to be poured out hereafter. And this greater unfolding u>

in His own words, to be attained in His absence. " Verily, verily

I say unto you, he that believeth on Me, the works that I do shall

he do also ; and greater works than these shall he do ; because I g°

* Mr. Mill's Autobiography.

THE POSITION OF THE BIBLE IN RELIGIOUS LIFE. 353

unto the Father." " It is expedient for you that I go away : for if
I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you ; but if I
depart, I will send Him unto you ; . . . and when He, the
Spirit of truth, is come, He will guide you into all truth." Nor
is this into the truth that Christ Himself had spoken, but into
things unuttered as yet; for He introduces this by the remark,
" I have yet many things to say unto you, but you cannot bear
them now." This is surely a declaration of incompletion which does
not admit of being explained away— a declaration so reasonable,
and in accordance with fact and man's nature, as well as with the
wisdom of the Divine Teacher, that its contrary only would require
explanation.

• John speaks of the multitude of Christ's unrecorded works, but
what shall we say of His unrecorded words ? What a world of
spiritual truth may lie in these forgotten words of our Lord!
Scholars join in lamentations over the lost books of a Latin or
Grecian writer, which may have fallen a prey to time, or the igno-
rance of their keepers ; and if such grief is reasonable, what regret
must we feel, that these words of spiritual wisdom and heavenly
truth, which fell upon the air on Galilean hills, or mingled with the
ripple of the lakes, or with the traffic of the town, or dropped like
dew in midnight loneliness, — that these words of life and hope have
passed into unseen vibrations, and vanished from the memory of
man.* So we in our ignorance think and speak, forgetting that far
greater world of unspoken truth shadowed forth in the expression,
"ye cannot bear them now." It is not merely that any material
record is inadequate to completely picture all that Christ did and
said ; this is acknowledged by the writers themselves, and is felt by
all with spiritual life of any vigour. It is rather the complete
insufficiency of any written history fully to express Christ. " Cer-
tainly," it has been well said, " a genuine prophet, who has worked
a long time, has, in the sanctuary of his heart, far more thoughts
and experiences, than he ever has publicly expressed, or may ex-
press." Every thinker has the same, and many know how much a
good author is superior to his books. But, what is true of pro-
phets and others is in a greater degree true of Christ. No book
could give us His mind and heart. If this were attempted, the

* The record in the Gospels, although extensive, considering the tken means
of preserving and handing down such information, is yet meagre in the extreme,
as an account ol three years' teaching.

A A

}

354 REASON AND REVELATION.

world would not contain the books that shonld be written. No-
where but on the tablets of our renovated hearts, and the hearts of
all men in all times, will this great revelation be unveiled in any
approximate fulness.

If we live in Him, then through the Spirit that proceeds from
Him and God we may be shown the deep things of God. We limit
ourselves to a book, instead of freely accepting the Spirit of promise,
and the power of the new life. It is not a history, a literature, or
a book that Christ gave — it is spirit and life imparted through His
love. The thought of a man at one with Christ, living in Him,
hid with Him in God, is as Divine and true a revelation to that man
(and to all men), as if he read it in a universally approved literary
and religious canon. There is along with the thought, the witness
of the Spirit with ours, which, as the Westminster Confession says,
is the only adequate testimony to spiritual truth, as the same Spirit
was the only guide to spiritual truth in the past, and, according to
Christ, will be the guide to all such truth in the future. It is at
this point that Paul's dictum is so true, " The letter killeth, bnt the
spirit giveth life," — a saying which has been verified again and again
in the history of Christianity, and the first part of which was never
better attested, than it is in the present day. There is abundant
regard for the letter of Christ's times, and of later and earlier times,
but no sufficient reverence for the spirit that lives through all
times.

It would seem, however, as if it were impossible to deny one
extreme without affirming another, which, in itself, is as untrue.
Thus, men like Theodore Parker hold that any progress in theology
and spiritual life must be conditioned by a substitution of absolute
religion, for the special form of Christianity in the Bible ; arguing)
that because men did not stop at Euclid, neither should they stop
at Christ. An unhappy illustration, if it means anything more, than
we have been saying. No geometrician has got beyond Euclid in
the sense of superseding his work, and the furthest advance of this
science and its related sciences can never dispense with principle
lying at the basis of all true development of knowledge in these
spheres. Such an extreme is old enough. It is not many years
since Chatillon of Geneva held, that man's spirit could eclipse the
light of Scripture, and Servetus and others, that the true Church
of Christ could exist without Scripture, and that the living voice
was more worthy. This, however, is not the life-giving spirit that
was in the mind of Paul. We desire to see the Bible in its trne

THE POSITION OP THE BIBLE IN RELIGIOUS LIFE. 355

position, as a help to spiritual life and an awakener of its powers.
By one extreme it is looked upon as more than a means to this —
as an end in itself. By another it is looked upon as less than
a means, as something, in fact, obsolete — a hindrance rather than
a help. Apart from all theory as to the nature of the Bible, and
so long as books are estimated according to their contents, I feel
assured, that as in the past men of spiritual discernment saw and
appreciated these various books, and felt their power, their elevated
purpose, their clear insight into what was permanent and eternally
true, and appraised their value by selecting them from other utter-
ances of the human spirit in fellowship with the Divine ; so in the
future men like-minded, knowing the life that has entered into these
accumulated experiences of God's people from earliest times, will not
value less, but with growing estimation will regard the record of a
past spiritual development, from which their own spiritual manhood
has sprung, and in which lies the seed of the kingdom of righteous-
ness and truth, destined to fill the whole earth.

What book can compare with these books, so various, yet so
much one in their undeviating aim, that we are not aware of any
anomaly in designating it the book of books ! Never, in myth,
poetry, history, biography, philosophy, prophecy, or letter, is its great
moral purpose forgotten or concealed. Where, in all the round of
literature, in the midst of such diversity of time, and place, and
literary form, can we find such constant loyalty to God and truth ?
It is awful in its tension, terrible in its seriousness. If, in the
future, not visible as yet by any sign of the times, men may happily
leave such a record far behind, superseding it by a better and a
purer exhibition of God's ways to man, and of man's walking in
these ways, still we never can imagine the time, when in their pro-
gress they shall leave behind the supreme life, embodied in a portion
of that record. That life is indestructible in its spirit, and repeats
itself from age to age, in the life of all who are united by faith to
what is Divine. Above the book itself is always the immortal life
within it ; but the life goes a long way in conferring a like immor-
tality upon the book. At least such a book deserves of us nothing
but reverent treatment, and it is matter of consolation to all who
look to it as the sun of their spiritual existence — the awakener of a
new element of life, as well as its means of growth and development
to ultimate perfection, to know, that no amount of criticism of what-
ever kind, so be that it is honest and truthful criticism, can perma-
nently affect its lasting usefulness. It also shonld be matter for con-

a a 2

356 REASON AND REVELATION.

gratnlation to all, that, being what it is, it demands of us the wisest
criticism and most rational assent we can command — that the basis
of it is not literalism or traditionalism, but spirit and life. It com-
municates to men, not doctrines, but new energies of souL On the
speculative, as well as on the practical, side of its spiritualism, its
first and last words are progress, freedom, truth : Follow Me : ye
shall be free indeed : sanctify them through Thy truth.

CHAPTER XIX.

CONCLUDING EEMABKS.
" Die Weisheit ist nur in der Wahrheit."

On some side or other it will yet be found, that all truth is related
and dependent, as all things, in reality, are dependent, on some com-
mon source and centre. These relations we are at present far from
knowing in any fulness, bnt in scientific inquiries, for example, the more
we do know of them, the greater is the advance in discovery at large.
The physical sciences have individually progressed sometimes by the
suggestions of sciences from without ; and this advance has in turn
acted upon another division. It would be premature to predict what
may happen, when wider views of merely physical subjects are at-
tained, and the entire dependency of all on each is gradually realised ;
but every one must foresee, that a greater love of truth shall be one
result — love, not of truth as represented by some special aspect of it in
one of its divisions, but of that conception of truth, which regards
it as an expression, " co-ordinating all things into one unity."

Although we have seen Scripture, on its human side, to be related
to the sciences, it may be asked, Is it, in the special character of its
contents, connected with other forms of truth ? In this question there
is much that is attractive. While many men have busied themselves
with contrasts between the true and the false, between revelation as
opposed to science and the like, this suggests a much more pleasant
task, viz., that of comparing truth with truth — of recognising every-
where a form of truth. It is not difficult to see, that truth must apply
to much more, than some would limit it to. One has only to con-
sider the essence of truth to see why this must be the case. Truth is
harmony between, what may be called, the idea and the real, in what-
ever sphere. This harmony we cannot yet be said to have absolutely
reached anywhere. Truth, to our search, is progressively discovered.
It dawns upon us as we are capable of apprehending it in detail, and
of building up, what we designate, the different truths into one whole.
We can, however, produce nothing in idea in all respects correspond-
ing to the real, because we cannot unite all we know in the great
sum of knowledge. We need a bond of union. For, only in one

358 REASON AND REVELATION.

whole, as I have said, will the related parts be perfectly understood.
This, or something like this, unity of ideas is ideal truth ; not limbs
only, bnt one perfect organism, part fitted to part and seen and
known by some intelligences. All the forms of truth may be con-
sidered as these parts : forms, which many men are working at
singly, unconscious of their relations, and whose resultant labours
other men take up, in order to discover the unity which they feel to
exist between the various parts — to find, if possible, the nerve fibres
of the organism of truth, or, if we may say so, the elixir that may
transmute the inorganic mass to the organic form.

One representation of this we have given us : One who is the
truth ; in whom, for all time, we see the bodied form of truth ; the
ideal realised in man, the God-man, that is, the perfect harmony ot
thought and action and will with the highest — God. To -work out
this transcendent connection of truth is not at present my purpose,
the time for working out such a problem has not arrived. In the
foregoing pages I have set before myself a less ambitious object, that
of comparing the flitting images and apparent broken outlines of
truth which come to us from various sources. But, if this be less am-
bitious than the higher aim, it is no less pleasurable a work. However
imperfectly executed, the endeavour even to give utterance to what
is undoubtedly a widespread belief, namely, that these outlines point
to some higher unity, if they do not clearly speak of it — the attempt
to make others feel, that these images of truth are not rival truths,
far less contradictory, but different sides of the same great whole,
— the rough quarry stones, if you will, wherewith the ideal edifice
will yet be reared, is not without necessity in our time, and at no time
needs an apology. We are all bound at least to do our best, and to
bring others to do their best. It must be a work of combination
to dress these rough quarry stones, and build, and base our work
upon the structure that our fathers reared. For it is only, if it beat
all possible, by continual increments of knowledge,, which is tested
truth, that the temple of truth can be completed, as it has been by
successive additions, that it has attained its present proportions.
And if ever men shall behold the last stone placed upon that
glorious pile, frequently seen in fable and in dream, they will read
in it the memorial of the toil and labour of our race throughout the
ages, a building doubtless of perfect symmetry and striking beauty,
whose form no man designed, but whose completion is the product
of mankind ; whose foundations were laid in dark oblivion, whereon
age after age has built, and on which succeeding times must place

CONCLUDING REMARKS. 359

successive thoughts. With visions such as these, which have been
common to men in all times, we are not surprised that many should
wish to know, whether these forms of truth are in reality many or
merely ideally so, — being broken images of the one form for which,
under various names and shapes, thoughtful minds everywhere have
longed — whether there is this perfect form which can take up the
others and round them into beauty, fill up all deficiency, reduce to a
minimum all falsity, with its large mirror show the image full, — an
image which now jets out fitfully in outlined form, dim, and grand,
and awe-inspiring, occasionally only, soul-satisfying.

These forms, in nature and in Scripture, may be the stream of light
which at present can only be felt successively. The sun, that full-
orbed will show the resplendent source whence these flow, we may
only fully know hereafter. We can now recognise differences in
the spheres to which each belongs, differences in their manner of
presentation and mode of perception ; but if we are convinced that
truth is one, we shall always find a difficulty in saying that there
is difference in kind, far less opposition in nature. Statements
such as these proceed generally from a confusion between meta-
physical and real unity. We cannot avoid, for the present, dis-
tinguishing between, what we call, the forms of truth, as we per-
ceive them, as, for example, between truth natural and spiritual ;
just as we cannot avoid distinguishing between the different forms of
natural truth. We must not, at our present stage of advancement,
allow ourselves to be carried beyond experience by notions of one-
ness so far, at least, as to imagine, that in a single line of pursuit,
be that physical or spiritual, we shall reach the perfect form. There
are evidently various lines converging somewhere, but we dare not
ante-date this convergence, or replace one line by another. Spiritual
truth as set forth in Scripture, although accepted to the full now
by all, would not put an end to any legitimate science. Psychology,
ethics, political economy, sociology, as well as the whole range of
physical sciences, would not, by this acceptance, be supplanted.

This supposed changed attitude to spiritual truth, putting aside
its undoubted practical effects upon society, could not, however, but
be helpful to every other form of investigation. And this is the great
gain which all genuine lovers and investigators of truth draw from
the conviction and belief of unity in the object of their search. The
half-hearted acquiescence in its oneness not only rouses opposition
among those who are, although they do not know it, fellow-labourers
in the same cause, but it hinders, in a very marked degree, the pro-

360 REASON AND REVELATION.

gress of the individual inquirer. Any truth known, and heartilr
accepted and acted on, is contributive to the investigation of every
other truth*. Any truth rejected is a turning away from so ranch
light, which will darken, more or less, the path that we have marked
out for ourselves, whose gloom is already so profound, that, only in
the slowest manner, and by groping for every step, can we proceed
at all. There are so many unknown quantities to find, as those who
try most know best, that we ought not wilfully to neglect the trans-
lation of the unknown into the known, by any worker at the problems
of life and thought, not only for the sake of the actual equations
successively worked out, but for the material help thus imparted
towards replacing by degrees the unknown by the known e ver y w here.

Science, both in its methods and results, has been of incalculable
advantage in the right comprehension of what are actually the con-
tents of Scripture. It has purified men's minds from many low and
unworthy conceptions, and purified Scripture from the admixtures
which men have thrown into it, in the belief that these were genuine
revelations of Divine and spiritual truth. Nor have we seen its
ultimate effects.

Spiritual truth, if faithfully and intelligently received, would
be productive of the healthiest influences upon all branches of
scientific inquiry. It would help us, for one thing, to map out more
clearly, than has yet been done, the divisions in the field of pos-
sible investigation, and thus clear away much that is irrelevant and
unattainable, thereby enabling us to prosecute what is intelligible
with more rigour, and in a temper of mind more becoming learners
of the truth, and aspirants to citizenship in its kingdom. For the
kingdom of nature, like the kingdom of heaven, they being- really
one and under one Lord, demands as the condition of entrance, that
which is the basis of all genuine spiritual life and intellectual growth
as well, namely, the heart of a little child. And until we write
over the gateway to the natural, what was long ago written over
the gateway of the heavenly, " Except ye be converted, and become
as little children, ye cannot enter in," we can but wander on the
borders of the land, strangers and aliens, however much we may
believe ourselves accredited citizens. So much truth is in the
remark, that "the child . . . stands nearer to the light by
which nature is to be read, than the dissector or antiquary."

In our pursuit of truth, therefore, it cannot be too often repeated,
that light from any quarter ought to be welcomed, both for its own
sake and for its beneficial effects upon other spheres.

March, 1876.

AN ALPHABETICAL LIST

OF

HENRY S. KING & CO.'S

PUBLICATIONS.

S a

1

6$ Cornhill, and i Paternoster Square, London,

March, i&j6.

A LIST OF

HENRY S. KING & CO.'S

PUBLICATIONS.

Abbey (Henry).

BALLADS 07 GOOD DEEDS, AKD OTHER YEBSSS. Fcap. 8vo.
Cloth gilt, price 5*.

Adams (A* L.), M.A.

iniD AKD FOBSST TUMBLES OF A KATUBALIST IE
HEW BBTTH8WI0X. With Notes and Observations on the
Natural History of Eastern Canada. Illustrated. 8yo. Cloth,
price 14*.

Adams (F. 0.), H.B.M.'s Secretary of Embassy at

Paris, formerly H.B.M.'s Charge d' Affaires, and Secretary of
Legation at Tedo.

THE HI8T0BY OF JAFAH. From the Earliest Period to the
Present Time. New Edition, revised. In 2 vols. With Maps
and Plans. Demy 8vo. Cloth, price 21s. each.

Adams (W. Davenport, Jun.)

LYBICS OF LOVE, from Shakespeare to Tennyson. Selected
and arranged by. Fcap. 8vo. Cloth extra, gilt edges, price 3#. Qd.

Adon.

THBOVGH 8T0BM AKD SUNSHIKE. Illustrated by M. E.
Edwards, A. T. H. Paterson, and the Author. Crown 8vo. Cloth,
price 7s. 6d.

A. & H. B.

A SCOTCH COMXUHIOH SUEDAY, to whioh are added Cer-
tain Discourses from a University City. By the Author of
"The Becreations of a Country Parson." Second Edition.
Crown 8vo. Cloth, price 5s,

4 A List of

Allen (Eev. R), M.A.

ABRAHAM : HIS LIFE, TIMES, AND TRAVELS, as told by

a Contemporary 3800 yean ago. With Map. Post 8vo. Cloth,
price 10*. 6d.

Amos (Professor Sheldon).

THE SCIENCE OF LAW. Second Edition. Crown 8vo.
Cloth, price 5s.
Yol. X. of the International Scientific Series.

Anderson (Eev. Charles), M.A.

NEW READINGS OF OLD PARABLES. Demy 8ro. Cloth,
price 4«. 6d.

CHURCH THOUGHT AND CHURCH WORK. Edited by.
Containing articles by the Revs. J. M. Capes, Professor
Cheetham, J. LI. Davis, Harry Jones, Brooke, Lambert, A. J.
Ross, the Editor, and others. Second Edition. Demy 8vo.
Cloth, price It. 6d.

WORDS AND WORKS IN A LONDON PARISH. Edited by.

Second Edition. Demy 8vo. Cloth, price 6a.

THE CURATE OF 8HYRE. Second Edition. 8vo. Cloth,
price 1b. 6d.

Anderson (Colonel K. P.)

VICTORIES AND DEFEATS. An Attempt to explain the
Causes which have led to them. An Officer's Manual. &emj
8vo. Cloth, price 14*.

Anson (Lieut.-Col. The Hon. A.), V.C., M.P.

THE ABOLITION OF PURCHASE AND THE ARMY REGU-
LATION BILL OF 1871. Crown 8vo. Sewed, price Is.

ARMT RESERVES AND MILITIA REFORMS. Crown 8vo.
Sewed, price 1*.

THE STORY OF THE SUPERSESSIONS, Crown 8vo. Sewed,
price 6d.

Archer (Thomas).

ABOUT MY FATHER'S BUSINESS. Work amidst the Sick,
the Sad, and the Sorrowing. Crown 8vo. Cloth, price 5*.

Argyle (Duke of).

SPEECHES ON THE SECOND READING OF THE CHURCH
PATRONAGE (SCOTLAND) BILL IN THE HOUSE OF LORDS,

June 2, 1874 ; and Earl of Camperdown's Amendment, June 9,
1874, placing the Election of Ministers in the hands of Bate*
payers. Crown 8vo. Sewed, price 1*.

Henry 8. King & Co.'s Publications.

Army op the North German Confederation.

A Brief Description of its Organization, of the Different
Branches of the Service and their rSle in War, of its Mode of
Fighting, etc., etc Translated from the Corrected Edition, by
permission of the author, by Colonel Edward Newdegate. Demy
8vo. Cloth, price 5a.

Abhantee War (The).

A Popular Narrative. By the Special Correspondent of the
Daily News. Crown 8vo. Cloth, price 6#.

Ashe (T.) Author of " The Sorrows of Hypsipyle."

EDITH; OB, LOVE AND LITE IN CHESHIRE. Sewed,
price 6d.

Ashton (John).

ROUGH NOTES 07 A VISIT TO BELGIUM, SEDAN, AND
PABI8, in September, 1870-71. Crown 8vo. Cloth, price 3s. 6d.

Aunt Mary's Bran Pie.

By the anthor of "St. (Wave's," "When I was a Little
Girl," etc. Illustrated. Cloth, price 3*. 6d.

BTTNNTLAND 8T0BIE8. Illustrated. Fcap. 8vo. Cloth,
price 3$. 6d.

Aurora: A Volume of Verse. Fcap. 8vo. Cloth,

price 5».

Ayrton (J. C.)

A SCOTCH WOOING. 2 vols. Crown 8vo. Cloth.

Bagehot (Walter).

PHYSICS AND POLITICS ; or, Thoughts on the Application of
the Principles of "Natural Selection" and "Inheritance" to
Political Society. Third Edition. Crown 8vo. Cloth, price 4s.

Volume II. of the International Scientific Series.

THE ENGLISH CONSTITUTION. A New Edition, Revised
and Corrected, with an Introductory Dissertation on Recent
Changes and Events. Crown 8vo. Cloth, price 7$. 6d

LOMBARD STREET. A Description of the Money Market.
Sixth Edition. Crown 8vo. Cloth, price It. Gd.

Bain (Alexander), LL.D.

MIND AND BODY. The Theories of their Relation. Fifth
Edition. Crown 8vo. Cloth, price 4«.
Volume TV. of the International Scientific Series.

6 A List of

Bakes (Mrs. G. Linnaeus).

GOD'8 PROVIDENCE HOUSE. Grown 8vo. Cloth, price 3*. GJ.

Baring (T. C), M.P., late Fellow of Brasenose

College, Oxford.

PINDAR IN ENGLISH RHYME. Being an Attempt to render
the Epinikian Odes with the principal remaining Fragments of
Pindar into English Rhymed Verse. Small quarto. Cloth,
price 7s.

Barlee (Ellen).

LOCKED OUT; A Tale of the Strike. With a Frontispiece,
Cloth, price Is. (kZ.

Batnes (Rev. Canon R. H.), Editor of " Lyra Angli-

cana," etc.

HOME SONGS FOB QUIET HOURS. Second Edition. Fcap.
8vo. Cloth extra, price 3s. 6d.
*»* This may also be had handtamely oound in Morocco with gilt edge*.

Becker (Bernard H.)

THE SCIENTIFIC SOCIETIES 07 LONDON. 1 toL Crown

8vo. Cloth, price 5s.

Bennett (Dr. W. C.)

SONGS FOB SAILORS. Dedicated by Special Bequest to
H.R.H. the Duke of Edinburgh. With Steel Portrait and
Illustrations. Crown 8vo. Cloth, price 3s. 6d.

An Edition in Illustrated Paper Covers, price Is.

BABY KAY. HOKE POEMS AND BALLADS. With Frontis-
piece. Crown 8vo. Cloth elegant, price 6s.

BABY MAY AND HOME POEMS. Fcap. 8vo. Sewed in
Coloured Wrapper, price Is.

NARRATIVE POEMS AND BALLADS. Fcap. 8vo. Sewed
In Coloured Wrapper, price Is.

Bennie (Rev. Jas. Noble), M.A.

THE ETERNAL LIFE. Sermons preached during the last
twelve years. Crown 8vo. Cloth, price 6s.

Bernard (Bayle).

SAMUEL LOVEB, THE LIFE AND UNPUBLISHED WORKS
OF. In 2 vols. With a Steel Portrait Post 8vo. Cloth,
price 21s.

Henry 8. King & Co. 9 * Publications.

Bethah-Edwabds (Miss M.)

KITTY. With a Frontispiece. Crown 8vo. Cloth, price St. 6d.
MADEMOISELLE JOSEPHINE'S FRIDAYS, AMD OTHER
8TOBIES. Grown 8vo. Cloth, price 7*. 64.

BlSCOE (A. C.)

THE EAELS 07 MIDDLETON, Lords of Clermont and of
Fettercairn, and the Middleton Family. Crown 8vo. Cloth,
price 10«. 6d.

Blano (Henry), M.D.

CHOLERA : HOW TO AVOID AND TREAT IT. Popular and
Practical Notes. Crown 8vo. Cloth, price 4*. 6d.

Blume (Major William).

THE OPERATIONS OF THE GERMAN ARMIES IN TRANCE,
from Sedan to the end of the war of 1870-71. With Map. From
the Journals of the Head-quarters Staff. Translated by the late
E. M. Jones, Maj. 20th Foot, Prof, of MiL Hist, Sandhurst
Demy 8vo. Cloth, price 9s.

Boguslawski (Captain A. von).

TACTICAL DEDUCTIONS FROM THE WAR OF 1870-71.
Translated by Colonel Sir Lumley Graham, Bart, late 18th
(Royal Irish) Regiment Third Edition, Revised and Corrected.
Demy Svo. Cloth, price 7s.

Bonwick (James).

THE TASMANIAN LILY. With Frontispiece. Crown 8vo.
Cloth, price 5s.

MIKE HOWE, THE BUSHRANGER OF VAN DIEMETS
LAND. With Frontispiece. Crown 8vo. Cloth, price 5s.

BoswELL (E. B.), M.A., Oxon.

METRICAL TRANSLATIONS FROM THE GREEK AND LATIN
POETS, and other Poems. Crown 8vo. Cloth, price 5s.

Bothmeb (Countess Yon).

CRUEL AS THE GRAVE. A Novel. 3 vols. Cloth.

Bowen (H. C.), English Master Middle-Class City

School, Cowper Street.

STUDIES IN ENGLISH, for the use of Modern Schools. Small
Crown 8vo. Cloth, price Is. 6d.

Bowring (L.), C.S.I., Lord Canning's Private Secretary,

and for many years Chief Commissioner of Mysore and Coorg.

EASTERN EXPERIENCES. Illustrated with Maps and
Diagrams. Demy 8vo. Cloth, price 16s.

Henry S. King & Co.'s Publications. 9

Brown (Bev. J. Baldwin), B.A.

. THE HIGHER LIFE. Its Reality, Experience, and Destiny.
Fourth Edition. Crown 8yo. Cloth, price 7«. 6d.

TH E DOCTRINE 07 ANNIHILATION IH THE LIGHT OF
THE GOSPEL 07 LOVE. Five Discourses. Second Edition.
Crown 8vo. Cloth, price 2*. 6d.

Brown (John Croumbie), LL.D., etc.

REBOISEMENT IH TRANCE ; or, Records of the Replanting of
the Alps, the Cevennes, and the Pyrenees with Trees, Herbage,
and Bush. Demy 8vo. Cloth, prfce 12*. 6d.

THE HYDROLOGY 07 SOUTHERN AFRICA. Demy 8vo.
Cloth, price 10#. 6d.

Browne (Bev. Marmaduke E.)

UNTIL THE DAY DAWN. Four Advent Lectures delivered
in the Episcopal Chapel, Milverton, Warwickshire, on the Sunday
evenings during Advent, 1870. Crown 8vo. Cloth, price 2s. 6d.

Bryant (William Cullen).

P0EM8. Red-line Edition. With 24 Illustrations and

Portrait of the Author. Post 8vo. Cloth extra, price 7a. 6d.

A Cheaper Edition, with Frontispiece. Post 8vo. Cloth,
price 3s. 6a.

Buchanan (Robert).

POETICAL WORKS. Collected Edition, in 3 Vols., with
Portrait. Price 6s. each.

Contents op the Volumes.

I. " Ballads and Romances." II. " Ballads and Poems of Life."

IH. " Cruiskeen Sonnets ;" and " Book of Orm."

MASTER-SPIRITS. Post 8vo. Cloth, price 10s. GcL

Bulkeley (Key. Henry J.)

WALLED IN, and other Poems. Crown 8vo. Cloth, price 5s.

BuNNfcTT (F. E.)

LEONORA CHRISTINA, MEMOIRS 07, Daughter of Christian
IV. of Denmark ; Written during her Imprisonment in the Blue
Tower of the Royal Palace at Copenhagen, 1663-1685. Trans-
lated by F. E. Bunnett. With an Autotype Portrait of the
Princess. A New and Cheaper Edition. Medium 8vo. Cloth,
price 5s.

LINKED AT LAST. 1 vol. Crown 8vo. Cloth.

UNDER A CLOUD; OR, JOHANNES OLA*. By E. D. Wille.
Translated by F. E. Bunnett. 8 vols. Cloth.

I

I 10 A List of

Bueton (Mrs, Eichard).

the inner life of syria, Palestine, and the

HOLY LAHD. 2 vols. Demy 8vo. Cloth, price 24*.

Butler (Josephine E.)

JOHN OBET (of Dilaton): MEMOIRS. By hi* Daughter. New
and Cheaper Edition. Crown 8vo. Cloth, price 3s. 63.

Cadell (Mrs. H. M.)

IDA CRAVEN: A Novel. 2 vols. .Crown 8vo. Cloth.

Calderon.

CALDERO1T0 DRAMAS : The Wonder-Working Magician-
Life is a Dream— The Purgatory of St. Patrick. Translated by
Denis Florence MaoCarthy. Post 8vo. Cloth, price 10*.

Camden (Charles).

HOITY TOUT, THS GOOD LITTLE FELLOW. With Eleven
Illustrations. Crown 8vo. Cloth, price St. 6U

THE TRAVELLING MENAGERIE. With Ten Illustrations
by J. Mahoney. Crown 8vo. Cloth, price 3*. Gd.

Carlisle (A. D.), B.A., Trin. Coll., Camb.

BOUND THE WORLD IN 1870. A Yolume of Travels, with
Maps. New and Cheaper Edition. Demy 8vo. Cloth, price 6s.

Carne (Miss E. T.)

THE REALM OF TRUTH. Crown 8vo. Cloth, price 5>. 64.

Carpenter (E.)

NARCISSUS AND OTHER POEMS. Fcap.8vo. Cloth, price 5*

Carpenter (W. B.), LL.D., M.D., F.RS., etc.

THE PRINCIPLES OF MENTAL PHYSIOLOGY. With their
Applications to the Training and Discipline of the Mind, and the
Study of its Morbid Conditions. Illustrated. 8vo. Cloth,
price 12*.

Carr (Lisle),

JUDITH GWYNNE. 8 vols. Second Edition. Crown 8va
Cloth.

Henry 8. King & Co.*8 Publications. 11

Christopherson (The late Eev. Henry), M.A.,

Assistant Minister at Trinity Church, Brighton.

BEBMONS. With an Introduction by John Rao, LL.D., F.S.A.
Crown 8vo. Cloth, price 7s. 6d.

Clayton (Cecil).

Errors gams; how she lost and how see wok.

A NoveL 2 vols. Cloth.

Clerk (Mrs. Godfrey), Author of " The Antipodes and

Round the World."

'ILAK EH HAS. Historical Tales and Anecdotes of the Times
of the Early Ehalifahs. Translated from the Arabic Originals.
Illustrated with Historical and Explanatory Notes. Crown
8vo. Cloth, price 7s.

Clert (C), Captain 32nd Light Infantry, Deputy

Assistant Adjutant-General, late Professor of Tactics Royal
Military College, Sandhurst.

MINOR TACTICS. Second Edition. With 26 Maps and
Flans. Demy 8vo. Cloth, price 16s.

Clodd (Edward), F.E.A.S.

THE CHILDHOOD OF THE WORLD: a Simple Account of
Man in Earjy Times. New Edition. Crown 8yo. Cloth, price 3s.
A Special Edition for Schools. Price Is.

THE CHILDHOOD 07 RELIGIONS. Including a Simple Account
of the Birth and Growth of Myths and Legends. Crown 8vo.
Cloth, prioe 5s.

Coleridge (Sara).

PRETTY LESSONS IN VERSE FOR GOOD CHILDREN, with
some Lessons in Latin, in Easy Rhyme. A New Edition.
Illustrated. Cloth, price 3s. 6d.

FHANTASHION. A Fairy Romance. With an Introductory
Preface by the Right Hon. Lord Coleridge, of Ottery St. Mary. A
New Edition. Illustrated. Cloth, price 7s. 6d.

MEMOIR AND LETTERS OF SARA COLERIDGE. Edited by
her Daughter. Third Edition, Revised and Corrected. With
Index. 2 vols. With Two Portraits. Crown 8vo. Cloth, prioe 24s.

Cheap Edition. With one Portrait Cloth, price 7s. 6d.

12 A List of

Collins (Mortimer).

THE PRINCESS CLARICE. A Story of 1671. 2 vols. Cloth.

BQUIBE SILOHEBTER'S WHIM. 8 vols. Cloth.

MIRANDA A Midsummer Madness. 3 vols. Cloth.

THE IHH OF STRANGE MEETINGS, AND OTHER POEM.
Crown Svo. Cloth, price 5«.

THE SECRET OF LOHG LIFE. Dedicated by special permission
to Lord St Leonard's. Fourth Edition. Large crown Svo. Price 5*.

Collins (Rev. Richard), M.A..

. MISSIONARY ENTERPRISE IV THE EAST. With apecUl
reference to the Syrian Christians of Malabar, and the results of
modern Missions. With Pout Illustrations. Crown 8vo. Cloth,
price G».

Oongreve (Richard), M.A., M.R.C.P.L.

HUMAN CATHOLICISM, Two Sermons delivered at the
PoBitivist School on the Festival of Humanity, 87 and 8$,
January 1, 1975 and 1876. Demy 8vo. Sewed, price Is.

Conway (Moncure D.)

REPUBLICAN BUPEBSTITIOirs. Illustrated by the Political
History of the United States. Including a Correspondence with
M. Louis Blanc. Crown 8vo. Cloth, price 5j.

CONTEBS (Ansley).

CHESTERLEIGH. S vols. Crown Svo. Cloth.

Cooke (M. C), M.A., LL.D.

TUTSI ; their Nature, Influences, Uses, etc Edited by the
Rev. M. J. Berkeley, H.A., F.L.& With Illnsrations. Second
Edition. Crown Svo. Cloth, price 5s.

Vol. XIV. of the International Scientific Series.

Cooke (Professor Josiah P.), of the Harvard University.

THE NEW CHEMISTRY. With Thirty-one Ulnntrationn.
Third Edition. Crown 8vo- Cloth, price 5s.
Vol. IX. of the International Scientific Series.
BCLEKTiJfiC CULTURE. Crown Svo. Cloth, price la.

Coopeb (T. T.)

TEE M1SMMES HILLS : an Account of a Journey made in on
Attempt to Penetrate Thibet bom Assam, to open New Routes
for Commerce. Second Edition. With Four Illustrations and
Map. Demy Svo. Crown Svo. Cloth, price 10*. 6U

Henry S. King dc CoSa Publications. 13

Cornhill Library of Fiction, The. Crown 8vo.

Cloth, price 3s. 6d. per Volume.

HALF-A-DOZEN DAUGHTERS. By J. Masterman.

THE HOUSE OF BABY. By Mrs. G. Hooper.

A FIGHT FOB LIFE. By Moy Thomas.

BOBIN GBAY. By Charles Gibbon.

KITTY. By Miss M. Betham-Edwards.

KBELL. By John Saunders.

ONE OF TWO; OB, THE LEFT-HANDED BRIDE. By
J. Hain Friswell.

BEADY-MONEY MORTTBOY. A Matter-of-Fact Story.

GOD'S PROVIDENCE HOUSE. By Mrs. 6. L. Banks.

FOB LACK OF GOLD. By Charles Gibbon.

ABEL DRAKE'S WIFE. By John Saunders.

Cory (Lieutenant- Colonel Arthur).

THE EASTERN KEN ACE; OR, SHADOWS OF COXING
EVENTS. Crown 8vo. Cloth, price 5>.

Cosmos. A Poem. Fcap. 8vo. Cloth, price 3*. 6d.

Subjects.— Nature in the Past and in the Present — Man in tho
Past and in the Present— The Future.

Cotton (Robert Turner).

KB. CABINGTON. A Tale of Love and Conspiracy. S vols.
Crown 870. Cloth.

Cummins (Henry Irwin), M.A.

PABOCHIAL CHABITIES OF THE CITY OF LONDON.

Sewed, prioe It.

Cubwen (Henry).

SOBBOW AND SONG: Studies of Literary Struggle. Henry
Mfirger — Novalis — Alexander Petofi — Honors' de Balzao — Edgar
Allan Poe— Andre* Chenier. 2 vols. Crown 8vo. Cloth, price 15#.

Davidson (Samuel), D.D., LL.D.

THE NEW TESTAMENT, TRANSLATED FBOM THE LATEST
GREEK TEXT OF TISCHENDOBF. Post 8ro. Cloth, prioe 10*. Gd.

Da vies (G. Christopher).

MOUNTAIN, MEADOW, AND MEBE: a Series of Outdoor
Sketches of Sport, Scenery, Adventures, and Natural History.
With Sixteen Illustrations by Bosworth W. Haroourt. Crown
8yo. Cloth, price 6«.

BAMBLES AND ADVENTURES OF OUR SCHOOL FIELD
CLUB. With 4 Illustrations. Crown 8vo. Cloth, price 5*.

14 A List of

Davies (Eev. J, Llewelyn), M.A.

THEOLOGY AND MORALITY. Essays on Questions of
Belief and Practice. Crown 8yo. Cloth, price 7*. 6tt

D'Anyers (N. E.)

LITTLE MINNIE'S TB0UBLE8. An Every -day Chronicle.
Illustrated by W. H. Hughes. Fcap. Cloth, price 3s. 6d.
A Simple Chronicle of a Child's Life.

De Kerkadec (Yicomtesse Solange).

A CHEQUERED LIFE, being Memoirs of Che Yicomtesse de
Leoville Meilhan. Edited by. Crown 8vo. Cloth, price 7s. 6d.

Containing many recollections of the First Emperor Napoleon
and his Court.

De L'Hoste (Colonel E. P).

THE DESERT PASTOR, JEAN JAR0U88EAU. Translated

from the French of Eugene Pelletan. With a Frontispiece.
New Edition. Fcap. 8vo. Price 8*. 6d.

De Liefde (Jacob).

THE GREAT DUTCH ADMIRALS. With Eleven Illustrations
by Townley Green and others. Crown 8vo. Cloth, price 5*.

De Kedcliffe (Viscount Stratford), P.O., KG., Gr.C.B.

WHY AH I A CHRISTIAN* Fifth Edition. Crown 8vo.
Cloth, -price 3*.

De Tocqtteville (Alexis).

CORRESPONDENCE AND CONYERSATIONS OF, WITH
HASSAU WILLIAM SENIOR. 2 vols. Post 8vo. Cloth, price 21*.

De Vere (Aubrey).

ALEXANDER THE GREAT. A Dramatic Poem. Small
crown 8vo. Cloth, price 5*.

THE INFANT BRIDAL, AND OTHER POEMS. A New

and Enlarged Edition. Fcap. 8vo. Cloth, price 7s. 6&

THE LEGEND8 OF ST. PATRICK, AND OTHER POEMS. Small
crown 8vo. Cloth, price 5*.

De Wille (E.)

UNDER A CLOUD; OR, JOHANNES OLAF. A Norel.
Translated by F. E. Bunnett 8 vols. Crown 8vo. Cloth.

Dennis (John).

ENGLISH SONNETS. CoUectod and Arranged. Elegantly
bound. Fcap. 8vo. Cloth, price 3a. 6U

Henry S. King A Co.'s Publications. 15

Dobson (Austin).

VIGNETTES IK BHYMB AND VEB8 DE 800I£t£. Second
Edition. Fcap. 8vo. Cloth, price 5«.

Donne (Alphonse), M.D.

CHANGE OP AIB AHD SCENE. A Physician's Hints about
Doctors, Patients, Hygiene, and Society ; with Notes of Excur-
sions for Health in the Pyrenees, and amongst the Watering-
places of France (Inland and Seaward), Switzerland, Corsica, and
the Mediterranean. A New Edition. Large post 8vo. Cloth,
price 9*.

Dowden (Edward), LL.D.

SEAX8PERE : a Critical Study of his Mind and Art Second
Edition. Post 8vo. Cloth, price 12*.

Downton (Eev. Henry), M.A.

HYMNS AND VEBSE8. Original and Translated. Small
crown 8vo. Cloth, price St. 6d.

Draper (John WUliam), % M.D., LL.D. Professor in

the University of New York; Author of "A Treatise on
Human Physiology."

HISTOBT 07 TEE CONFLICT BETWEEN RELIGION AND
SCIENCE. Seventh Edition. Crown 8vo. Cloth, price 5*.
VoL XUI. of the International Scientific Series.

Drew (Rev. G. S.), M.A., Vicar of Trinity, Lambeth.

SCBIFTUBE LANDS IN CONNECTION WITH THEIR
HISTOBT. Second Edition. 8vo. Cloth, price 10#. 6d.

NAZARETH: ITS LIVE AND LESSONS. Third Edition.
Crown 8vo. Cloth, price 5s.

THE DIVINE KINGDOM ON EARTH AS IT IS IN HEAVEN.

8vo. Cloth, price 10*. 6d.

THE SON OF MAN : His Life and Ministry. Crown 8vo. Cloth,
price 7s. 6d.

Drewby (Gr. Overend), M.D.

THE COMMON-SENSE MANAGEMENT OF THE STOMACH.

Second Edition. Fcap. 8vo. Cloth, price 2*. 6d.

Dtjrand (Lady).

IMITATIONS FBOM THE GERMAN OF 8PITTA AND
TEBSTEGBN. Fcap. 8yo. Cloth, price 4s.

16 A 1

Do Yebnois (Colonel von

BTTTOIEB IS LEADING Ti
Translation by Lieutenant H
and II. Demy 8to. Cloth, j
E. A. V.

JOSEFS XAZZISI : A
Mozztai— " Thoughts on E
Man." Dedicated to the Wo:
With Two Portraits. Crown

Edeh (Frederic).

THE KILE WITHOUT ,

Crown 8to. Cloth, price 7$. I

Edwaedb (Key. Basil).

KIR OB OHOBDB; OB, I
a Vol nme of Verse. Fcap.
price 2$. 6d.
Eiloaht (Mrs.)

1adt mobetourtb datji
English Clebgyman.
ah essay oh the btj!

ATHAHA8IU8. Shall the
removed from the Prayer-bool

Epic of Hades (The).

THE EPIC OF HADES.

" Songs of Two Worlds." F<

Ebos Aoonistes. Poems.

Cloth, price 3s. flrf.
Evans (Mark).

THE BTOKT OF ODB FA'
being a New and Enlarged E
Foap. 8vo. Cloth, price 3«. bVi

A BOOK OF COMMON
HOUSEHOLD TJBE, compiled
tures. Foap. 8vo. Cloth, pri»

Eyre (Maj.-Gen. Sir Vincer

LAYS OF A KNIGHT-EBB

crown 8™. With Sii IUustra

Pharaoh Land. | Home Lan<

F-AiTHFirLL (Mrs. Francis G

LOVE KB, OB LOVE HE 1

Henry S. King & Co.'s Publications. 17

Fabquhabson (Martha).

I. ELSIE DINSXOBE. Grown 8vo. Cloth, price 3a. U.

XL ELSIE'S GIRLHOOD. Grown 8vo. Cloth, price 3a. 6<Z.

m. ELSIE'S HOLIDAYS AT BOSELANDS. Crown 8?o. Cloth,
price 3«. 6d.

Favre (Mons. Jules).

THE GOVERNMENT OF THE NATIONAL DEFENCE. From
the 30th June to the 31st October, 1870. The Plain Statement
of a Member. Demy 8vo. Cloth, price 10a. Gd,

Fisheb (Alice).

HIS QUEEN. 3 vols. Crown 8vo. Cloth.

Forbes (Archibald).

SOLDIERING AND SCRIBBLING. A Series of Sketches.
Crown 8vo. Cloth, price 7a. 6d.

FOTHEBGILL (JESSIE).

HE A LEY. A Romance. 3 vols. Crown 8yo. Cloth.

Fowle (Eev. T. W.), M.A.

THE RECONCILIATION OF RELIGION AND SCIENCE.

Being Essays on Immortality, Inspiration, Miracles, and the
Being of Christ. Demy 8vo. Cloth, price 10*. 6d.

Fraser (Donald), Accountant to the British-Indian

Steam Navigation Company, Limited.

EXCHANGE TABLES OF STERLING AND INDIAN RUPEE
CURRENCY, upon a new and extended system, embracing Values
from One Farthing to One Hundred Thousand Pounds, and at
Kates progressing, in Sixteenths of a Penny, from la. dd. to
2a. 3d. per Rupee. Royal 8vo. Cloth, price 10a. Gd.

Frere (Sir.H. Bartle E.), G.C.B., G.C.S.I., etc.

THE THREATENED FAMINE IN BENGAL : How it may be

Met, and the Recurrence of Famines in India Prevented. Being
No. 1 of " Occasional Notes on Indian Affairs." With 3 Maps.
Crown 8vo. Price 5a.

Friswell (J. Hain).

THE BETTER SELF. Essays for Home Life. Crown 8vo.
Price 6a.

Contents: — Beginning at Home —The Girls at Home — The
Wife's Mother — Pride in the Family — Discontent and Grumbling
— Domestic Economy — On Ecepiug People Down — Likes and
Dislikes— On Falling Out — Peace.

ONE OF TWO; OR, THE LEFT-HANDED BRIDE. With a
Frontispiece. Crown 8vo. Price 3a. 6d.

B b

1

18 A List of

Gardner (John), M.D.

LONGEVITY; THE MEANS 07 PROLONGING UR AFTER
MIDDLE AGE. Third Edition, revised and enlarged. Small
orown 8to. Cloth, price 4s.

Garrett (Edward).

BY STILL WATERS. A Story for Qniet Hours. With Seren
Illustrations. Crown 8vo. Cloth, price 6s.

Gibbon (Charles).

FOR LACK OF GOLD. With a Frontispiece. Crown 8m
Cloth, price 3s. 6d.

ROBIN GRAT, With a Frontispiece. Crown Syo. Cloth,
price Ss. 6<J.

Gilbert (Mrs.)

MRS. GILBERT, FORMERLY ANN TAYLOR, AUTOBIO-
GRAPHY AND OTHER MEMORIALS OF. Edited by Josiah
Gilbert. New and revised Edition. In 2 vols. With 2 Steel
Portraits and several Wood Engravings. Post8vo. Cloth, price 24s.

Gill (Rev. W. W.), B.A., of the London Missionary

Society.

MYTHS AND SONGS FROM THE SOUTH PACIFIC. With a
Preface by F. Max Muller, M.A., Professor of Comparative
Philology at Oxford. Post 8yo. Cloth, price 9s.

Godkin (James).

THE RELIGIOUS HISTORY OF IRELAND : Primitive, Papal,
and Protestant Including the Evangelical Missions, Catholic
Agitations, and Church Progress of the last half Century. 8vo.
Cloth, price 12s.

Godwin (William).

WILLIAM GODWIN: HIS FRIENDS AND CONTEMPO-
RARIES. With Portraits and Facsimiles of the handwriting
of Godwin and his Wife. By C. Kegan Paul. 2 vols. Demy
Svo. Cloth, price 28s.

THE GENIU8 OF CHRISTIANITY UNVEILED. Being Essays
never before published. Edited, with a Preface, by C» Kegan
PauL 1 voL Crown 8vo. Cloth, price 7s. Qd.

Goetze (Gapt. A. von), Captain of the Prussian Corps

of Engineers attached to the Engineer Committee, and Instructor
at the Military Academy.

OPERATIONS OF THE GERMAN ENGINEERS DURING THE
WAR OF 1870-1871. Published by Authority, and in accordance
with Official Documents. Translated from the German by
Colonel G. Graham, V.C., C.B., R.E. With 6 large Maps.
Demy Svo. Cloth, price 21s.

Henry S. King & Co. 3 8 Publications. 19

Goodman (Walter).

CUBA, THE PEARL OF TEX ANTILLES. Crown 8vo. Cloth,
price 1$. 6d

Gosse (Edmund W.)

OK VIOL AHD FLUTE. With Title-page specially designed
by William B. Soott. Crown 8vo. Cloth, price 5s.

Gould (Eev. S. Baring).

THE VICAR OF H0EWEJN8T0W : a Memoir of the Bey. B. S.
Hawker. With Portrait Post 8vo. Cloth, price 10«. 6d.

Granville (A. B.), M.D., F.E.S., etc.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A. B. GRANVILLE, F.R.S., etc.
Edited, with a brief account of the concluding years of his life, by
his youngest Daughter, Paulina B. Granville. 2 vols. With
a Portrait. Demy 8vo. Cloth, price 32t.

Gray (Mrs. Eussell).

LISETTE'S VENTURE. A Novel 2 vols. Crown 8vo. Cloth,
price 21«.

Green (T. Bowden).

FRAGMENTS OF THOUGHT. Dedicated by permission to the
Poet Laureate. Crown 8vo. Cloth, price 7s. 6d.

Greenwood (James), " The Amateur Casual."

IN STRANGE COMPANY; or, The Note Book of a Roving
Correspondent. Second Edition. Crown 8vo. Cloth, price 6*.

Grey (John), of Dilston.

JOHN GREY (of Dilston): MEMOIRS. By Josephine E.
Butler. New and Cheaper Edition. Crown 8vo. Cloth, price
8*. 6d.

Griffith (Eev. T.), A.M., Prebendary of St. Paul's.

STUDIES OF THE DIVINE MASTER. Demy 8vo. Cloth,
price 12*.

Griffiths (Captain Arthur).

MEMORIALS OF MILLBANK, AND CHAPTERS IN PRISON
HISTORY. With Illustrations. 2 vols. Post 8vo. Cloth,
price 2Ig.

THE QUEEN'S SHILLING. A Novel. 2 vols. Cloth, price 2U

Gruner (M. L.)

STUDIES OF BLAST FURNACE PHENOMENA. Translated
by L. D. B. Gordon, F.R.S.E., F.G.S. Demy 8vo. Cloth, price
7$. 6d.

20 A List of

Gubnet (Rev. Archer Thompson).

WORDS OF FAITH AND GHEES. A Mission of Instruction
and Suggestion. 1 voL Crown 870. Cloth, price 6s.

FIRST PRINCIPLES IN CHURCH AND 8TATE. Demy 8m

Sewed, price Is. 6d.

Haeckel (Professor Ernst), of the University of Jena.

THE HISTORY OF CREATION. A Popular Account of the
Development of the Earth and its Inhabitants, according to the
Theories of Kant, Laplace, Lamarck, and Darwin. The Transla-
tion revised by Professor E. Ray Lankester, M.A., F.R.S. With
Coloured Plates and Genealogical Trees of the various groups
of both plants and animals. 2 vols. Post 8vo. Cloth, price 32j.

Harcourt (Capt. A. F. P.)

THE SHAKESPEARE ARGOSY : Containing much of the wealth
of Shakespeare's Wisdom and Wit, alphabetically arranged and
classified. Crown 8vo. Cloth, price 6s.

Haweis (Rev. H. R.), M.A.

SPEECH IN SEASON. Third Edition. Crown Svo. Cloth,
price 9s.

THOUGHTS FOR THE TIMES. Ninth Edition. Crown Svo.
Cloth, price 7s. 6<Z.

UN SECTARIAN FAMILY PRAYERS, for Morning and Even-
ing for a Week, with short selected passages from the Bible.
Square crown 8vo. Cloth, price 8s. 6<Z.

Hawthorne (Julian).

BRE8SANT. A Romance. 2 vols. Crown Svo. Cloth,
price 21s.

IDOLATRY. A Romance. 2 vols. Crown 8vo. Cloth, price
21*.

Hawthorne (Nathaniel).

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. A Memoir, with Stories now
first published in this country. By II. A. Page. Post8vo. Cloth,
price 7s. 6d.

SEPTIMITJS. A Romanoe. Second Edition. Crown 8ro*
Cloth, price 9s.

Hayman (Henry), D.D., late Head Master of Rugby

School.

RUGBY SCHOOL SERMONS. With an Introductory Essay on
the Indwelling of the Holy Spirit. Crown 8vo. Cloth, price 7s. 6d.

Heathergate. A Story of Scottish Life and Character.

By a New Author. 2 vols. Crown 8vo. Cloth, price 21s,

Henry S. King & Go.' 8 Publications. 21

Hellwald (Baron P. Von).

THE RUSSIANS IN CENTRAL ASIA. A Critical Examination,
down to the present time, of the Geography and History of
Central Asia. Translated by Lieut.-Col. Theodore Wirgmaa,
LL.B. In 1 vol. Large post 8vo. With Map. Cloth, price 12*.

Helvig (Captain Hugo).

TEE OPERATIONS 07 THE BAVARIAN ABMY COEPB.

Translated by Captain G. S. Schwabe. With Five large Maps.
In 2 toIs. Demy 8vo. Cloth, price 24*.

Hinton (James), late Aural Surgeon to Guy's Hospital.

THE PLAGE 07 THE PHYSICIAN. Being the Introductory
Lecture at Guy's Hospital, 1873-74 ; to which is added Essays
on the Law of Human Life, and on the Relation between
Organic and Inobganio Woblds. Second Edition. Crown 8yo.
Cloth, price 3s. 6d.

PHYSIOLOGY FOB PRACTICAL USE. By various writers.
With 50 Illustrations. 2 vole. Second Edition. Crown 8vo. Price
12«. 6d.

AN ATLAS 07 DISEASES 07 THE XEXBBANA TYMPANI.
With Descriptive Text. Post 8vo. Price £6 6«.

THE QUESTIONS 07 AUBAL SURGERY. With Illustra-
tions. 2 vols. Post 8vo. Cloth, price 12*. 6d.

Hockley (W. B.)

TALES 07 THE ZENANA; or, A Nuwab's Leisure Hours.
By the Author of " Pandurang Hari." With a Preface by Lord
Stanley of Alderley. 2 vols. Crown 8vo. Cloth, price 21*.

PANDURANG HARI ; or, Memoirs of a Hindoo. A Tale of
Mahratta Life sixty years ago. With a Preface by Sir H. Bartle
E. Frere, G.C.S.I., etc. 2 vols. Crown 8vo. Cloth, price 21*.

Hoffbatjeb (Captain).

THE GERMAN ARTILLERY IN THE BATTLES NEAR METZ.
Based on the official reports of the German Artillery. Translated
by Capt. E. O. Hollist. With Map and Plans. Demy 8vo.
Cloth, price 21*.

Holroyd (Major W. E. M.), Bengal Staff Corps,

Director of Public Instruction, Punjab.

TAS-HIL UL KALAH; or, Hindustani made Easy. Crown
8vo. Cloth, price 5e.

Hope (Lieut. James).

IN QUEST 07 COOLIES. With Illustrations. Crown 8vo.
Cloth, price 6*.

1

How

Henry S. King & Co.'s Publications. 23

International Scientific Sebies (The).'

I. THE FORMS OF WATER IN CLOUDS AND RIVERS, IOE
AND GLACIERS. By J. Tyndall, LL.D., F.R.S. With
14 Illustrations. Sixth Edition. 5*.

II. PHYSICS AND POLITICS; or, Thoughts on the Application of
the Principles of "Natural Selection" and " Inheritance n
to Political Society. By Walter Bagehot Third Edition, 4*.

XXL FOODS. By Edward Smith, M.D., LL.B., F.R.S. Profusely
Illustrated. Fourth Edition. 5*.

IV. KIND AND BODY: The Theories of their Relation. By
Alexander Bain, LL.D. With Four Illustrations. Fifth
Edition. 4*.

V. THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY. By Herbert Spencer. Fifth
Edition. 5*.

VI. ON THE CONSERVATION OF ENERGY. By Balfour Stewart,
M.D.,LL.D.,F.R.S. With 14 Engravings. Third Edition. 5$.

VII. ANIMAL LOCOMOTION; or, Walking, Swimming, and Flying
By J. B. Pettigrew, M.D., F.R.S. With 119 Illustrations.
Second Edition. 5«.

VIII. RESPONSIBILITY IN MENTAL DISEASE. By Henry
Maudsley, M.D. Second Edition. 5$.

IX. THE NEW CHEMISTRY. By Professor J. P. Cooke, of the
Harvard University. With 31 Illustrations. Third
Edition. 5*.

X. THE SCIENCE OF LAW. By Professor Sheldon Amos.
Second Edition. 5*.

XI. ANIMAL MECHANISM. A Treatise on Terrestrial and Aerial
Locomotion. By Professor E. J. Marey. With 117 Illus-
trations. Second Edition. 5«.

XXL THE DOCTRINE OF DESCENT AND DARWINISM. By
Professor Oscar Schmidt (Strasburg University). With
26 Illustrations. Third Edition. 5s.

Xm. THE HISTORY OF THE CONFLICT BETWEEN RELIGION
AND SCIENCE. By Professor J. W. Draper. Seventh
Edition. 5s.

Henry S. King & Oo.'s Publications. 25

International Scientific Series (The).

Forthcoming Volumes.

Prof. W. Ktngdon Clifford, M.A. The First Principles of the
Exact Sciences explained to the Non-mathematical.

Prof. T. H. Huxley, LL.D., F.R.S. Bodily Motion and
Consciousness.

Dr. W. B. Carpenter, LL.D., F.R.S. The Physical Geography
of the Sea.

Prof. William Odltng, F.B.S. The Old Chemistry viewed from
the New Standpoint.

W. Laudeb Lindsay, M.D., F.B.S.E. Mind in the Lower Animals.

Sir John Lubbock, Bart., F.B.S. On Ants and Bees.

Prof. W. T. Thiselton Dyer, B.A., B.Sc. Form and Habit in
Flowering Plants.

Mr. J. N. Lookyeb, F.B.S. Spectrum Analysis.

Prof. Michael Foster, M.D. Protoplasm and the Cell Theory.

H. Charlton Bastian, M.D., F.B.S. The Brain as an Organ of
Blind.

Prof. A. C. Ramsay, LL.D., F.B.S. Earth Sculpture: Hills,
Valleys, Mountains, Plains, Rivers, Lakes; how they were Pro-
duced, and how they have been Destroyed.

Prof. Rudolph Vibchow (Berlin Univ.) Morbid Physiological
Action.

Prof. Claude Bernard. History of the Theories of Life.

Prof. H. Satnte-Claiee Devtllb. An Introduction to General
Chemistry.

Prof. Wubtb. Atoms and the Atomic Theory.

Prof. De Quatrefages. The Human Race.

Prof. Lacaze-Duthier8. Zoology since Cuvier.

Prof. Berthelot. Chemical Synthesis.

26 A List of

International Scientifig Series (The). — Continued. <

(Forthcoming Volumes.) i

Prof. J. Rosenthal. General Physiology of Muscles and Nerves. ,

Prof. Jambs D. Dana, M. A., LL.D. On Cephalizaiion ; or, Head-
Characters in the Gradation and Progress of Life. ,

Prof. S. W. Johnson, M. A. On the Nutrition of Plants.

Prof. Austin Flint, Jr. M.D. The Nervous System, and its
Relation to the Bodily Functions.

Prof. Ferdinand Cohn (Breslau Univ.) Thallophytes (Alg»
Liohens, Fungi).

Prof. Hermann (University of Zurich). Respiration.

Prof. Leuokart (University of Leipsic). Outlines of Animal
Organization.

Prod Liebbbioh (University of Berlin). Outlines of Toxicology.

Prof. Kundt (University of Strasburg). On Sound.

Prof. Rexs (University of Erlangen). On Parasitic Plants.

Prof. Steinthal (University of Berlin). Outlines of the Science

of Language.

P. Bert (Professor of Physiology, Paris). Forms of Life and
other Cosmical Conditions.

E. Alqlave (Professor of Constitutional and Administrative Law
at Douai, and of Political Economy at Lille). The Primitive
Elements of Political Constitutions.

P. Lorain (Professor of Medicine, Paris). ' Modern Epidemics.

Mons. Freidel. The Functions of Organic Chemistry.

Mons. Debrat. Precious Metals.

Prof. Corfield, M.A., M.D. (Oxon.) Air in its relation to Health.

Prof. A. Giard. General Embryology*

Henry S. King & Co. 9 8 Publications. 27

Hutton (James).

MISSIONARY UTS IK THE SOUTHERN SEAS. With Illus-
trations. Grown 8vo. Cloth, price 7«. 6d.

Ignotus.

CTTLMSHUtE FOLK. A Novel. New and Cheaper Edition.
Crown 8vo. Cloth, price 6«.

Ingelow (Jean).

TEE LITTLE WONDER-HORN. A Second Series of " Stories
Told to a Child." With Fifteen Illustrations. Square 24mo.
Cloth, price 3a. 6c?.

OFF THE BKELUG8. (Her First Romance.) 4 vols. Crown
8vo. Cloth, price 42a.

Jackson (T. G.)

XODERN GOTHIC ARCHITECTURE. Crown 8vo. Cloth,
price 5*.

Jacob (Maj.-Gen. Sir G. Le Grand), KC.S.L, C.B.

WESTERN INDIA REFORE AND DURING THE MUTINIES.
Pictures drawn from life. Second Edition. Crown 8vo. Cloth,
price 7*. 6(2.

Jenkins (E.) and Eaymond (J.), Esqs.

A LEGAL HANDB OOK FOR ARCHITECTS, BUILDERS, AND
BUILDING OWNERS. Second Edition Revised. Crown 8vo.
Cloth, price 60.

Jenkins (Kev. E. C), M.A., Eector of Lyminge, and

Honorary Canon of Canterbury.

THE PRIVILEGE OF PETER, Legally and Historically Ex-
amined, and the Claims of the Roman Church compared with the
Scriptures, the Councils, and the Testimony of the Popes them-
selves. Fcap. 8vo. Cloth, price 3*. 6<£

Jenkins (Edward), M.P.

GLANCES AT INNER ENGLAND. A Lecture delivered in the
United States and Canada. Crown 8vo. Cloth, price 5*.

GINX'S BABT : His Birth and other Misfortunes. Thirty-
fourth Edition. Crown 8vo. Cloth, price 2b.

LITTLE HODGE. A Christmas Country Carol. Fourteenth
Thousand. With Five Illustrations. Crown 8vo. Cloth, price 5*.
A Cheap Edition in paper covers, price Is.

LORD BANTAM. Seventh Edition. Crown 8yo. Cloth, price
2*. 6d.

28 A List of

Jevons (Prof. W. Stanley).

MONEY AND THE MECHANISM OF EXCHANGE. Second
Edition. Grown 8vo. Cloth, price 5*.
Vol. XYIL of the International Scientific Series.

Eaufmann (Eev. M.), B.A.

SOCIALISM : Its Nature, its Dangers, and its Remedies con-
sidered. Crown 8vo. Cloth, price 7*. 6cL

Keating (Mrs.)

HONOR BLAZE : The Story of a Plain Woman. 2 Tola.
Crown 8vo. Cloth, price 21i.

Keb (David).

ON THE ROAD TO KHIVA. Illnstrated with Photographs of
the Country and its Inhabitants, and a copy of the Official Map
in use during the Campaign, from the Survey of Captain Leusilin.
Post 8yo. Cloth, price 12*.

THE BOY SLAVE IN BOKHARA. A Tale of Central Asia.
With Illustrations. Crown 8vo. Cloth, price 5*.

THE WILD HORSEMAN OF THE PAMPAS. Illustrated.
Crown 8vo. Cloth, price 5*.

King (Alice).

A CLUSTER OF LIVES. Crown 8vo. Cloth, price 7s. &Z.

King (Mrs. Hamilton).

THE DISCIPLES. A New Poem. Second Edition, with some
Notes. Crown 8vo. Cloth, price 7«. Gd.

A8PR0M0NTE, AND OTHER POEMS. Second Edition. Fcap.
8vo. Cloth, price 4a. 67Z.

Kingsfobd (Eev. F. W.), M.A., Vicar of St. Thomas's,

Stamford Hill ; late Chaplain H. E. I. C. (Bengal Presidency).

HARTHAM CONFERENCES; or, Discussions upon some of
the Religious Topics of the Day. " Audi alteram partem." Crown
8vo. Cloth, price 3*. 6d.

Knight (Annette F. C.)

POEMS. Fcap. 8vo. Cloth, price 5s.

Lacobdaibe (Eev. Pfcre).

LIFE: Conferences delivered at Toulouse. A New and
Cheaper Edition. Crown 8vo. Cloth, price 8s. 6cL

Lady of Lipabi (The).

A Poem in Three Cantos. Fcap. 8vo. Cloth, price 5s.

Henry 8, King & Co* 8 Publications. 29

Laurie (J. S.), of the Inner Temple, Barrister-at-Law ;

formerly H.M. Inspector of Schools, England ; Assistant Royal
Commissioner, Ireland; Special Commissioner, African Settle-
ment ; Director of Public Instruction, Ceylon.

EDUCATIONAL C0TJB8E OF SECULAR SCHOOL BOOKS FOB
INDIA.

The /(Mowing Works are novo ready : —

THE FIBST HINDUSTANI BEADEB. Stiff linen wrapper,
price 6d.

THE SECOND HINDUSTANI BEADEB. Stiff linen wrapper,
price 6d.

GEOGRAPHY OF INDIA ; with Maps and Historical Appendix,
tracing the growth of the British Empire in Hindustan. 128 pp.
fcap. 8vo. Cloth, price Id. 6d.

Laymann (Captain), Instructor of Tactic3 at the

Military College, Neisse.

THE FRONTAL ATTACK OF INFANTBY. Translated by
Colonel Edward Newdigate. Crown 8vo. Cloth, price 2«. 6<Z.

L. D. S.

LETTERS FROM CHINA AND JAPAN. 1 vol. With Illus-
trated Title-page. Crown 8vo. Cloth, price 7*. 6d.

Leander (Eichard).

FANTASTIC 8T0BIES. Translated from the German by
Paulina B. Granville. With Eight full-page Illustrations by
M. E. Fraser-Tytler. Crown 8vo. Cloth, price 5*.

Leathes (Eev. Stanley), M.A.

THE GOSPEL ITS OWN WITNESS. Being the Hulsean
Lectures for 1873. Crown 8vo. Cloth, price 5*.

Lee (Eev. Frederick George), D.C.L.

THE OTHER WOBLD; or, Glimpses of the Supernatural.
Being Facts, Records, and Traditions, relating to Dreams,
Omens, Miraculous Occurrences, Apparitions, Wraiths, Warn-
ings, Second-sight, Necromancy, Witchcraft, etc. 2 vols. A
New Edition. Crown 8vo. Cloth, price 158.

Lee (Holme).

HEB TITLE OF HONOTTB. A Book for Girls. Now Edition.
With a Frontispiece. Crown 8vo. Cloth, price 5*.

Lenoir (J).

FATOTTM; or, Artists in Egypt. A Tour with M. Gerome
and others. With 13 Illustrations. A New and Cheaper
Edition. Crown 8vo. Cloth, price 3s. 6d.

30 A List of

LlSTADO (J. T.)

CIVIL SERVICE. A Novel. 2 vols. Grown 8to. Cloth.

Lommel (Dr. Eugene), Professor of Physics in the

University of Erlangen.

THE NATURE OF LIGHT: With a General Account of
Physical Optics. Second Edition. With 188 Illustrations and
a table of Spectra in Chromolituography. Grown 8vo. Cloth,
price 5«.

Vol. XVIII. of the International Scientific Series.

Lorimer (Peter), D.D,

JOHN KNOX AND THE CHURCH 07 ENGLAND: His work
in her Pnlpit and his influence upon her Liturgy, Articles, and
Parties. Demy 8vo. Cloth, price 12s.

Lover (Samuel), E.H.A.

THE LITE OF SAMUEL LOVER, R.H.A.; Artistic, literary,
and Musical. With Selections from his Unpublished Papers and
Correspondence. By Bayle Bernard. 2 vols. With a Portrait.
Post 8vo. Cloth, price 21*.

Lower (Mark Antony), M.A., F.S.A.

WAY8IDE NOTES IN SCANDINAVIA Being Notes of Travel
in the North of Europe. Crown Svo. Cloth, price 9«.

Lyons (B. T.), Surgeon-Major, Bengal Army.

A TREATISE ON RELAPSING FEVER. Post 8vo. Cloth,
price 7«. 6d.

Maoaulay (James), M.A., M.D., Edin.

IRELAND. A Tour of Observation, with Remarks on Irish
Public Questions. A New and Cheaper Edition. Crown 8vo,
Cloth, price 3«. 6d.

Mac Carthy (Denis Florence).

CALDERON'S DRAMAS. Translated from the Spanish. Post
8vo. Cloth, gilt edges, price 10*.

Mao Donald (George).

GUTTA-PERCHA WILLIE, THE WORKING GENIUS. With
Nine Illustrations by Arthur Hughes. Second Edition. Crown
8vo. Cloth, price 3t. 6d.

MALCOLM. A Novel. 3 vols. Second Edition. Crown 8vo.
Cloth.

ST. GEORGE AND ST. MICHAEL. 3 vols. Crown 8vo. Cloth.

Henry S. King & Co. 9 * Publications. 31

Mao Kenna (Stephen J.)

PLUCKY FELLOWS. A Book for Boys. With Six Illustrations.
Second Edition. Crown 8yo. Cloth, price 3*. 6cf.

AT SCHOOL WITH AN OLD DRAGOON. With Six Illustra-
tions. Crown 8vo. Cloth, price 5s.

Maclachlan (Archibald Neil Campbell), M.A.

WILLIAM AUGUSTUS, DUKE OF CUMBERLAND : being a
Sketch of his Military Life and Character, chiefly as exhibited
in tho General Orders of his Royal Highness, 1745—1747. With
Illustrations. Post 8vo. Cloth, price 15*.

Mair (R. S.), M.D., F.R.C.S.E., late Deputy Coroner

of Madras.

THE MEDICAL GUIDE FOB ANGLO-INDIANS. Being a

Compendium of Advice to Europeans in India, relating to the

Preservation and Regulation of Health. With a Supplement on

_ the Management of Children in India. Crown 8vo. Limp cloth,

price 3*. 6d.

Manning (His Eminence Cardinal).

ESSATS OH RELIGION AND. LITERATURE. By various
Writers. Demy 8yo. Cloth, price 10s. 6d.

Contents: — The Philosophy of Christianity — Mystic Elements
of Religion — Controversy with the Agnostics — A Reasoning
Thought — Darwinism brought to Book — Mr. Mill on Liberty of
the Press — Christianity in relation to Society — The Religious
Condition of Germany— The Philosophy of Bacon — Catholic
Laymen and Scholastic Philosophy.

Maret (E. J.)

ANIMAL MECHANICS. A Treatise on Terrestrial and Aerial
Locomotion. With 117 Illustrations. Second Edition. Crown
8vo. Cloth, price 5s.

Volume XI. of the International Scientific Series.

Markewitch (B.)

THE NEGLECTED QUESTION. Translated from the Russian,
by the Princess Ourousoff, and dedicated by Express Permission
to Her Imperial and Royal Highness Marie Alexandrovna, the
Duchess of Edinburgh. 2 vols. Crown 8vo. Cloth, price 14*.

Marriott (Maj.-Gen. W. F.), C.S.L

A GRAMMAR OF POLITICAL ECONOMY. Crown 8vo. Cloth,
price 6s.

Marshall (Hamilton).

THE STORT OF SIR EDWARD'S WIFE. A Novel. Crown
8vo. Cloth, price 10«. 6cZ.

32 A List of

Marzials (Theophile).

TEE GALLERY OF PIGEONS, and other Poems. Crown Sro.
Cloth, price is. Gd.

Masterman (J.)

HALF-A-DOZEN DAUGHTERS. With a Frontispiece. Crown
8\o. Cloth, price 3*. Gd.

Maudsley (Dr. Henry).

RESPONSIBILITY IN MENTAL DI8EA8E. Second Edition.
Crown 8vo. Cloth, price 5*.
Vol. VIII. of the International Scientific Series.

Maughan (William Charles).

THE ALPS OP ARABIA; or, Travels throngh Egypt, Sinai,
Arabia, and the Holy Land. With Map. A New and Cheaper
Edition. Demy 8vo. Cloth, price 5*.

Maurice (C. Edmund).

LIVES OF ENGLISH POPULAR LEADERS. No. 1.— Stephen

Langton. Crown 8vo. Cloth, price 7*. Gd.
No. 2. — Ttleb, Ball, and Oldoastle. Crown 8vo. Price 7s, Gd.

Medley (Lieut.-Col. J. G.), Koyal Engineers.

AN AUTUMN TOUR IN THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA.
Crown 8vo. Cloth, price 5*.

Menzies (Sutherland).

MEMOIRS OF DISTINGUISHED WOMEN. Post 8vo. Cloth.

Anne de Bourbon.
The Duchess de Longuevelle.
The Duchess de Chevbeuse.
Princess Palatine.
Mademoiselle de Montfensieb.

Madame de Montbazon.
The Duchess of Portsmouth.
Sarah Jennings.
Sarah, Duchess of Mabl-
borouh.

MlCKLETHWAITE (J. T.), F.S.A.

MODERN PARISH CHURCHES: Their Plan, Design, and
Furniture. Crown 8vo. Cloth, price 7b. Gd.

Mirus (Major-General von).

CAVALRY FIELD DUTY. Translated by Major Frank S.
Russell, 14th (King's) Hussars. Crown 8yo. Cloth limp, price
7«. Gd.

Moore (Eev. Daniel), M.A.

CHRIST AND HIS CHURCH. A Course of Lent Lectures,
delivered in the Parish Church of Holy Trinity, Paddington. By
the author of "The Age and the Gospel : Hulsean Lectures," etc
Crown 8vo. Cloth, price 3*. Gd.

Henry S. King & Co.'s Publications. 33

Mooee (Kev. Thomas), Vicar of Christ Church,

Chesham.

6ERM0NETTES: on Synonymous Texts, taken from the Bible
and Book of Common Prayer, for the Study, Family Reading, and
Private Devotion. Small Grown 8vo. Cloth, price 4*. 6d.

MORELL (J. E.)

EUCLID SIMPLIFIED IN METHOD AND LANGUAGE. Being
a Manual of Geometry. Compiled from the most important
French Works, approved by the University of Paris and the
Minister of Publio Instruction. Fcap. 8vo. Cloth, price 2*. 64.

Morice (Rev. F. D.), M.A., Fellow of Queen's College,

Oxford.

TEE OLYMPIAN AND PYTHIAN ODES 07 PINDAR. A New

Translation in English Verse. Crown 8vo. Cloth, price Is. 6d.

Morley (Susan).

AILEEN FERRERS. A Novel. 2 vols. Crown 8vo. Cloth.
THR08TLETHWAITE. A NoveL 3 vols. Crown 8vo. Cloth.

Morse (Edward S.), Ph. D., late Professor of Com-
parative Anatomy and Zoology in Bowdnin College.

FIRST BOOK OF ZOOLOGY. With numerous Illustrations.
Crown 8vo. Cloth, price 5i.

Mostyn (Sydney).

PERPLEXITY. A NoveL 3 vols. Crown 8vo. Cloth.

Musgrave (Anthony).

STUDIES IN POLITICAL ECONOMY. Crown 8vo. Cloth,
price 6s.

My Sister Eosalind. By the Author of " Christina

North," and " Under the Limes." A Novel. 2 vols. Cloth.

Naake (John T.), of the British Museum.

SLAVONIC FAIRY TALES. From Russian, Servian, Polish,
and Bohemian Sources. With Four Illustrations. Crown 8vo.
Cloth, price 5*.

Newman (John Henry), D.D.

CHA RACTERISTICS FROM THE WRITINGS OF DR. J. H.
NEWMAN. Being Selections, Personal, Historical, Philosophical,
and Religions, from his various Works. Arranged with the
Author's personal approval. Second Edition. With Portrait.
Crown 8vo. Cloth, price 6s.

%• A Portrait of the Rev. Dr. J. H. Newman, mounted for
framing, can be had, price 2i. &Z,

* 9

34 A LUt of

Newman (Mrs.)

TOO LATE. A Novel 2to1s. Crown 8 vo. Goth.

Noble (James Ashcroft).

THE PELICAN PAPERS. Reminiscences and Remains of o
Dweller in the Wilderness. Crown 8vo. Cloth, price 6*.

Norman People (The).

THE NORMAN PEOPLE, and their Existing Descendants in
the British Dominions and the United States of America. Demy
8to. Cloth, price 21s.

Nobbis (Eev. A.)

THE INNER AND OUTER LITE POEMS. Fcap. 8vo. Cloth,
price 6# .

Notbege (John), A.M.

THE SPIRITUAL FUNCTION of a PRESBYTER IN THE
CHURCH OF ENGLAND. Crown 8to. Cloth, red edges, price

Oriental Sporting Magazine (The).

THE ORIENTAL SPORTING MAGAZINE. A Reprint of the
first 5 Volumes, in 2 Volumes. Demy 8vo. Cloth, price 28*.

Our Increasing Military Difficulty, and one Way

of Meeting it. Demy 8vo. Stitched, price Is.

Page (H. A.)

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, A MEMOIR OF, with Stories
now first published in this country. Large post 8vo. Cloth,
price 7s. 6d.

Page (Capt. S. Flood).

DISCIPLINE AND DRILL. Four Lectures delivered to the
London Scottish Rifle Volunteers. Cheaper Edition. Crown
8vo. Price Is,

Palgrave (W. Gifford).

HERMANN AGHA. An Eastern Narrative. 2 vols. Crown
8to. Cloth, extra gilt, price 18s.

Parker (Joseph), D.D.

THE PARACLETE : An Essay on the Personality and Ministry
of the Holy Ghost, with some reference to current discussions.
Second Edition. Demy 8vo. Cloth, price 12*.

Parr (Harriett).

ECHOES OF A FAMOUS YEAR. Crown 8vo. Cloth, price
8«. 6d.

Henry 8. King & Co.'s Publications. 35

Paul (C. Kegan).

GOETHE'S FAUST. A New Translation in Rime. Crown 8vo.
Cloth, prioe 6«.

WILLIAM GODWIN: HIS FRIENDS AND CONTEMPO-
RARIES. With Portraits and Facsimiles of the Handwriting of
Godwin and his Wife. 2 vols. Demy 8vo. Cloth, price 28#.

Payne (John).

BONGS OF LIFE AMD DEATH. Crown 8vo. Cloth, price 5*.

Payne (Professor).

LECTURES OK EDUCATION. Price 6(2. each.
I. Pestalozzi: the Influence of His Principles and Practice.

II. Frobel and the Kindergarten System. Second Edition.
III. The Science and Art of Education.

IY. The True Foundation of Science Teaching.

Peixetan (Eug&ne).

THE DESERT FASTOB, JEAN JAR0U86EAU. Translatod
from the French. By Colonel E. P. De L'Hoste. With a
Frontispiece. New Edition. Foap. 8to. Cloth, price 3«. 6d.

Penbice (Major J.), B.A.

• A DICTIONARY AND GLOSSARY OF THE HO-RAN. With
copious Grammatical References and Explanations of tho Text
4to. Cloth, prioe 21*.

Pebceval (Eev. P.)

TAMIL PBOVEBBS, WITH THEIB ENGLISH TBAN8LATI0N.

Containing upwards of Six Thousand Proverbs. Third Edition.
Demy 8vo. Sewed, price 9*.

Pebbieb (Amelia).

A WINTER IN MOROCCO. With Four Illustrations. A New
and Cheaper Edition. Crown 8vo. Cloth, price 3*. 6d.

A GOOD MATCH. A Novel. 2 vols. Crown 8vo. Cloth.

Pettigbew (J. B.), M.D., F.E.S.

ANIMAL LOCOMOTION; or, Walking, Swimming, and Flying.
Second Edition. With 119 Illustrations. Crown 8vo. Cloth,
price 5*.

Volume VII. of the International Scientific Series.

Piggot (John), F.S.A, P.R.G.S.

PERSIA— ANCIENT AND MODERN. Post Sto. Cloth, price
10f. 6d.

36 A List of

i — — ■

Poushkin (Alexander Serguevitch).

RUSSIAN ROMANCE. Translated from the Tales of Belkin,
etc. By Mrs. J. Buchan Telfer (n^fe Mouravieff). Crown 8?o,
Cloth, price 7*. 6d.

Power (Harriet).

OUR INVALIDS : HOW SHALL WE EMPLOY AND AMUSE
THEM ? Fcap 8vo. Cloth, price 2«. 6(2.

Powlett (Lieut Norton), Koyal Artillery.

EASTERN LEGENDS AND STORIES IN ENGLISH VERSE.

Crown 8vo. Cloth, price 5s.

Presbyter.

UNF0LDING8 OF CHRISTIAN HOPE. An Essay showing that
the Doctrine contained in the Damnatory Clauses of the Creed
commonly called Athanasian is unscripturaL Small crown 8vo.
Cloth, price 4*. 6<Z.

Price (Prof. Bonamy).

CURRENCY AND RANKING. Crown 8vo. Cloth, price 6s.

Proctor (Richard A.) .

OUR PLACE AMONG INFINITIES. A Series of Essays con-
trasting our little abode in space and time with the Infinities
around us. To which are added Essays on " Astrology," and
" The Jewish Sabbath." Second Edition. Crown 8vo. Cloth,
price 6*.

THE EXPANSE OF HEAVEN. A Series of Essays on the
Wonders of the Firmament. With a Frontispiece. Second
Edition. Crown 8to. Cloth, price 6*.

Ranking (B. Montgomerie).

STREAMS FROM HIDDEN SOURCES. Crown 8vo. Cloth,
price 6*. N

Ready-Money Mortiboy.

READY-MONEY MORTIBOY. A Matter-of-Fact Story. With
Frontispiece. Crown 8vo. Cloth, price 3*. &L

Reaney (Mrs. Gr. S.)

WAXING AND WORKING; OR, FROM GIRLHOOD TO
WOMANHOOD. With a Frontispiece. Crown 8vo. Cloth, price 5*.

SUNBEAM WILLIE, AND OTHER STORIES, for Home Reading
and Cottage Meetings. 8 Illustrations. Small square, uniform
with " Lost Gip," etc. Prioe 1*. 6d.

Reginald Bramble.

REGINALD BRAMBLE. A Cynic of the Nineteenth Century.
An Autobiography. Crown 8vo. Cloth, price 10*. 6d,

Henry S. King & Co.'a Publications. 37

Eeid (T. Wemyss).

CABINET PORTRAITS. Biographical Sketches of Statesmen
of the Day. Crown 8?o. Cloth, price 7a. 6d.

Rhoades (James).

TIMOLEON. A Dramatio Poem. Fcap. 8yo. Cloth, price 5a.

Bibot (Professor Th.)

CONTEMPORARY ENGLISH PSYCHOLOGY. Second Edition.
Bevised and corrected translation from the latest French
Edition. Large post 8vo. Cloth, price 9a.

An analysis of the views and opinions of the following meta-
physicians, as expressed in their writings: — James Mill, Alexander
Bain, John Stuart Mill, George H. Lewes, Herbert Spencer,
Samuel Bailey.

HEREDITY: A Psychological Study on its Phenomena, its
Laws, its Causes, and its Consequences. Large crown 8vo.
Cloth, price 9a.

Robebtson (The Late Eev. F. W.), M.A.

THE LATE BEV. F. W. BOBEBTSON, K.A., LIFE AND
LETTERS OF. Edited by the Rev. Stopford Brooke, M.A.,
Chaplain in Ordinary to the Queen.

I. 2 vols., uniform with the Sermons. With Steel Portrait. Crown
8vo. Cloth, price 7a. 6d.

II. Library Edition, in Demy 8yo. with Two Steel Portraits.
Cloth, price 12a.

III. A Popular Edition, in 1 vol. Crown 8vo. Cloth, price 6*.

New and Cheaper Editions :—
SERMONS.

Yol. I. Small crown 8vo. Cloth, price 3a. &Z.

Vol. II. Small crown 8vo. Cloth, price 3*. 6d.

Vol. III. Small crown 8vo. Cloth, price 3*. 6d.

Vol. IV. Small crown 8vo. Cloth, price 3a. 6d.

EXPOSITORY LECTURES ON ST. PAUL'S EPISTLE TO THE
CORINTHIANS. Small crown 8vo. Cloth, price 5a.

AN ANALYSIS OF MR. TENNYSON'S "IN HEMORIAX."

(Dedicated by Permission to the Poet-Laureate.) Fcap. 8vo.
Cloth, price 2a.

THE EDUCATION OF THE HUMAN RACE. Translated from
the German of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. Fcap. 8vo. Cloth,
price 2a. 6d.

The above Works can also be had bound in half-morocco.

%* A Portrait of the late Rev. F. W. Robertson, mounted for
framing, can be had, price 2s. 6d.

LECTURES AND ADDRESSES, with other literary remains.
A New Edition. Crown 8vo. Cloth, price 5a.

38 A List of

Ross (Mrs. Ellen), (" Nelsie Brook")

DADDY'S PET. A Sketch from Humble Life. Uniform with
"LostGip." With Six Illustrations. Square crown 8vo. Cloth,
price la.

ROXBUBGHE LOTHIAN.

DANTE AND BEATRICE FROM 1282 TO 1290. A Romance.

2 vols. Post 8vo. Cloth, price 24s.

Russell (William Clark).

MEMOIRS OF MRS. LXTITIABOOtHBY. Crown 8vo. Cloth,
price 7a. 6cL

Russell (E. R.)

IRVING AS HAMLET. Second Edition. Demy 8m Sewed,
price la.

Sadleb (S. W.), R.N., Author of " Marshall Vavasour."

THE AFRICAN CRUISER. A Midshipman's Adventure* on
the West Coast. A Book for Boys. With Three Illustrations.
Second Edition. Crown 8yo* Cloth, price St. 6tt

Samabow (Gregor).

FOB SCEPTRE AND GROWN. A Bomanoe of the Present
Time. Translated by Fanny Wormald. 2 vols. Crown 8to.
Cloth, price 15s.

Saunders (Katherine).

THE HIGH MILS. A Novel. 3 vols. Crown 8vo. Cloth.

GIDEON'S ROCK, and other Stories. Crown 8to. Cloth,

t>rice 6a. '

JOAN MERRYWEATHER, and other Stories. Crown 8vo.
Cloth, price 6s.

MARGARET AND ELIZABETH. A Story of the Sea. Crown
8vo. Cloth, price 6#.

Saunders (John).

HIRELL. With Frontispiece. Crown 8vo. Cloth, price St. 6cL

mfflf" ■ B ¥5F i WXn ' With *w«*toofc Crown 8vo,
Cloth, pnoe 3s. 6d. r

Schell (Major von).

JESn2 PB 5£ n ? Ha 0F ™ *!*** ARMY TODER GEN. VON
GOEBBN. Translated by Col. C. H. von Wright Fonr Ma™
Demy 8vo. Cloth, price 9a. *^

BT^SiSS^^ 118 ! ^?V ntif tf" ™» OEN.VOM

Henry S. King & Co.'s Publications. 39

Schebff (Major W. von).

STUDIES IN THE HEW INFANTRY TACTICS. Parts I. and
II. Translated from the German by Colonel Lumley Graham.
Demy 8vo. Cloth, price 7*. 6d.

Schmidt (Prof. Oscar), Strasburg University.

THE DOCTRINE 07 DESCENT AND DARWINISM. Third
Edition. 26 Illustrations. Crown 8m Cloth, price 5*.
Vol. XII. of the International Scientific Series.

Schutzenbergeb (Prof. F.), Director of the Chemical

Laboratory at the Sorbonne.

FERMENTATION. With numerous Illustrations. Crown 8vo.
Cloth, price 5*.
VoL XX. of the International Scientific Series.

Scott (Patrick).

THE DREAM AND THE DEED, and other Poems. Foap.
8vo. Cloth, price 5>.

Seeking his Fortune, and other Stories.

SEEKING HIS FORTUNE, and other Stories. With Four
Illustrations. Crown 8to. Cloth, price 3a. 6d.

Senior (Nassau William).

ALEXIS DE T0CQUEVILLE. Correspondence and Conversa*
tions with Nassau W. Senior, from 1833 to 1859. Edited by
M. C. M. Simpson. 2 vols. Large post 8vo. Cloth, price 21#.

JOURNALS KEPT IN FRANCE AND ITALY. From 1848 to
1852. With a Sketch of the Revolution of 1848. Edited by his
Daughter, M. C. M. Simpson. 2 vols. Post 8vo. Cloth, price 24«.

Seven Autumn Leaves.

SEVEN AUTUMN LEAVES FROM FAIRYLAND. Illustrated
with 9 Etchings. Square crown 8yo. Cloth, price 3$. 6d.

Shadwell (Major-General), C.B.

MOUNTAIN WARFARE. Illustrated by the Campaign of 1799
in Switzerland. Being a Translation of the Swiss Narrative com-
piled from the Works of the Archduke Charles, Jomini, and
others. Also of Notes by General H. Dufour on the Campaign of
the Valtelline in 1635. With Appendix, Maps, and Introductory
Remarks. Demy 8vo. Cloth, price 16*.

Sheldon (Philip).

WOMAN'S A RIDDLE; or, Baby Warmstrey. A Novel. 3 vols.
Crown 8vo. Cloth.

40 A List of

Sherman (Gen. W. T.)

MEMOIRS OF GEN. W. T. 8HEEMAN, Commander of the Federal
Forces in the American Civil War. By Himself. 2 vols. With
Map. Demy8vo. Cloth, price 24s. Copyright English Edition.

Shelley (Lady).

SHELLEY MEMORIALS FROM AUTHENTIC SOURCES. With
(now first printed) an Essay on Christianity by Percy Byssho
Shelley. With^ Portrait Third Edition. Crown 8vo. Cloth,
price 5*.

Shipley (Eev. Orby), M.A.

STUDIES IN MODERN PROBLEMS. By various Writers.
2 vols. Crown 8vo. Cloth, price 5s. each.

Contents,— Vol. L

Sacramental Confession.

Abolition of the Thirty-
nine Articles. Part I.

The Sanctity of Marriage.

Creation and Modern
Science.

Retreats for Persons Living in

the World.
Catholic and Protestant.
The Bishops on Confession in

the Church of England.

Contents.— Vol. n.

Some Principles of Chris-
tian Ceremonial.

A Layman's View of Con-
fession of Sin to a Priest.

Missions and Preaching Orders.
Abolition of the Thirty-nine

Articles. Part II.
The FirBt Liturgy of Edward

Parts I. and II. VL and our own office oon-

Reservation of the Blessed
Sacrament.

trasted and compared.

Smedley (M. B.)

BOARDING-OUT AND PAUPER SCHOOLS FOB GIRLS. Crown
8vo. Cloth, price 3«. 6&

Smith (Edward), M.D., LL.B., F.R.S.

HEALTH AND DISEASE, as influenced by the Daily, Seasonal,
and other Cyclical Changes in the Human System. A New
Edition. Post 8vo. Cloth, price 7*. 6d.

FOODS. Profusely Illustrated. Fourth Edition. Crown 8vo.
Cloth, price 5«.

Volume III. of the International Scientific Series.

. PRACTICAL DIETARY FOR FAMILIES, SCHOOLS, AND THE
LABOURING CLASSES. A New Edition. Post 8vo. Cloth,
price 3s. 6d.

CONSUMPTION IN PCS EARLY AND REMEDIABLE STAGES.

A New Edition. Post 8vo. Cloth, price 7f. &Z.

Henry S. King & Co.'s Publications. 41

Smith (Hubert^

TENT LIFE WITH ENGLISH GIPSIES IN NORWAY. With
Five full-page Engravings and Thirty-one smaller Illustrations
by Whymper and others, and Map of the Country shoving
Routes. Second Edition. Revised and Corrected. Post 8vo.
Cloth, price 21«. i

Songs fob Music

SONGS FOB MUSIC. By Four Friends. Square crown 8vo..
Cloth, price 5«.

Containing Songs by Reginald A. Gatty, Stephen H. Gatty,
Greville J. Chester, and Juliana H. Ewing.

Some Time in Ireland.

SOME TIME IK IRELAND. A Recollection, Crown 8vo.
Cloth, price 7s. 6cZ.

Songs of Two Worlds.

SONGS OF TWO WORLDS. By a New Writer. First Series.
Second Edition. Fcap. 8vo. Cloth, price 5s.

SONG8 OF TWO WORLDS. By a New Writer. Second Series.
Second Edition. Fcap. 8vo. Cloth r price 5*.

SONGS OF TWO WORLDS. By a New Writer. Third Series.
Second Edition. Fcap. 8vo. Cloth, price 5s.

Spencer (Herbert).

THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY. Fifth Edition. Crown 8vo. Cloth,
price 5s.
Volume Y. of the International Scientific Series.

Spicer (Henry),

OTHCS DEATH WAGER. A Dark Page of History. Illus-
trated. In Five Acts. Fcap. 8vo. Cloth, price 5#.

Stevenson (Bev. W. Fleming).

HYMNS FOR THE CHURCH AND HOME. Selected and
Edited by the Rev. W. Fleming Stevenson.

The most complete Hymn Book published.

The Hymn Book consists of Three Parts :— I. For Public Wor-
ship.— II. For Family and Private Worship.— EEL For Children.

+** Published in various forme and prices, (he latter ranging
from Sd. to 6s. Lists and fuU particulars will be furnished on
application to the Publishers,

Stewart (Professor Balfour).

ON THE CONSERVATION OF ENERGY. Third Edition.
With Fourteen Engravings. Crown 8vo. Cloth, price 5s.
Volume VI. of the International Scientific Series.

42 A List of

Stonehewer (Agnes).

MONACELLA : A Legend of North Wales. A Poem. Fcap.
,8yo. Cloth, prioe 3s. 6d.

Stretton (Hesba). Author of " Jessica?s First Prayer."

CAS8Y. Twenty-sixth Thousand. With Six Illustrations.
Square crown 8vo. Cloth, price Is. 6d.

THE KING'S SEEVANT8. Thirty-second Thousand. With
Eight Illustrations. Square crown 8vo. Cloth, price Is. 6d.

LOST GIP. Forty-fifth Thousand. With Six Illustrations.
Square crown 8vo. Cloth, price Is. 6d.

* # * Also a handsomely-bound Edition, with Twelve IUuetratione,
price 2$. 6cZ.

THE WONDERFUL LIFE. Ninth Thousand. Fcap.8vo. Cloth,
price 2s.6<Z.

FRIENDS TILL DEATH. With Frontispiece. Limp cloth,
price 6&

TWO CHRISTMAS STORIES. With Frontispiece. Limp
cloth, price 6d.

MICHEL LORIES CROSS, AND LETT ALONE. With Frontis-
piece. Limp cloth, price 6a. '

OLD TEAK SOME. With Frontispiece. Limp cloth, price 64.

HESTER MORLETS PROMISE. 3 vols. Crown 8vo. Cloth.

THE DOCTOR'S DILEMMA. 3 vols. Crown 8to. Cloth.

Sully (James).

SENSATION AND INTUITION. Demy 8to. Cloth, prioe 10s. 6d.

Taylor (Eev. J. W. Augustus), M.A.

POEMS. Fcap. 8vo. Cloth, price 5s.

Taylor (Sir Henry).

EDWIN THE PAIR AND ISAAC COMNENUS. Fcap. 8vo.
Cloth, price 3s. 6d.

A SICILIAN SUMMER AND OTHER POEMS. Fcap. Svo.
Cloth, price 3s. 6d.

PHILIP VAN ARTEVELDE. A Dramatic Poem. Fcap. Svo.
Cloth, price 5s.

Taylor (Colonel Meadows), C.S.I., M.R.I.A.

SEETA. A Novel 3 vols. Crown 8vo. Cloth.

RALPH DARNELL. 8 vols. Crown 8vo. Cloth.

TIPPOO 8TTLTAN. 3 vols. Crown 8vo. Cloth.

THE CONFESSIONS OP A THUG. Crown 8va Cloth, price 6s.

TARA : a Mahratta Tale. Crown 8va Cloth, price 6$,

Henry 8. King & Co.'a Publications. 43

* ■ *

Tennyson (Alfred).

QUEEN XABY. A Drama. New Edition. Grown 8vo. Cloth,
price 6*.

Tennyson's (Alfred) Works. Cabinet Edition. Ten

Volumes. Each with Portrait Fcap. 8vo. Cloth, price 2s. 6d.

Cabinet Edition. 10 vols. Complete in handsome Orna-
mental Case. Price 28s.

Tennyson's (Alfred) Works. Author's Edition. Com-
plete in Five Volumes. Poet 8vo. Cloth gilt, price 81s. 6df. ;
half-morocco, Roxburgh style, price 39s.

EABLY POEMS, and ENGLISH IDYLLS.— Vol. I.

LOCK8LEY HALL, LUCRETIUS, and other Poems.— Vol. II.

TBS IDYLLS 07 THE KINO (Complete).— Vol. III.

THE PEINCESS, and MAUD.— Vol. IV.

ENOCH ARDEN, and IN MEM0EIAM.— Vol. V.

TENNYSON'S IDYLLS OF THE KINO, and other Poems.
Illustrated by Julia Margaret Cameron. 1 vol Folio. Half-
bound morocco, cloth sides. Six Guineas.

Tennyson's (Alfred) Works. Original Editions.

POEH0. Small 8vo. Cloth, price 6s.
MAUD, and other Poems. Small 8vo. Cloth, price 3s. 6d.
THE PEINCESS. Small 8vo. Cloth, price 3s. Gd.
IDYLLS OF THE KING. Small 8to. Cloth, price 5s.
IDYLLS OP THE KINO. Collected. Small 8m Cloth,
price 6s.

THE HOLY GRAIL, and other Poems. Small 8vo. Cloth,
price 4s. 6cL

GARETH AND LYNETIE. Small 8vo. Cloth, price 3s.

ENOCH ASDEN, etc. Small 8vo. Cloth price 3s. 6d.

SELECTIONS PROM THE ABOVE WORKS, Square 8vo.
Cloth, price 3s. 6d. Cloth gilt, extra, price 4s.

SONGS FROM THE ABOVE WORKS. Square 8vo. Cloth
extra, price 3s. 6d.

IN MEMOBIAM. Small 8vo. Cloth, price 4s.

LIBRARY EDITION. In 6 vols. Demy 8vo. Cloth, price
10s. 6<2. each.

POCKET VOLUME EDITION. 11 vols. In neat case, 31s. 6cZ.

Ditto, ditto. Extra cloth gilt, in case, 35s.

POEMS. Illustrated Edition. 4to. Cloth, price 25s.

44 AIM of

Thomas (Moy).

A TIGHT FOB LIFE. With Frontispiece. Crown 8vo. Cloth,
price 3s. 6<i

Thomson (J. T.), RR.G.S.

HAKAYTT ABDTTLLA. The Autobiography of a Malay Mnnshi,
between the years 1808 and 1843. Demy 8vo. Cloth, price 12*.

Thompson (A. C.)

FBELUDE8. A Volume of Poems. Illustrated by Elizabeth
Thompson (Painter of "The Boll Call"). 8yo. Cloth, price 7& 6d.

Thompson (Eev. A. S.), British Chaplain at St.

Petersburg.

HOME W0BD8 FOB WANDEBEB8. A Volume of Sermons.

Crown 8vo. Cloth, price 6». '

Thoughts in Vebse. Small crown 8vo. Cloth, price
is. 6d.

Thbing (Eev. Godfrey), B.A.

HYMNS AND 8A0BED L7BICS, Fcap. 8vo. Cloth, price 5«.

Todd (Herbert), M.A.

ABVAN ; or, The Story of the Sword. A Poem. Crown 8vo,
Cloth, price 7s. 6cL

Tbahebne (Mrs. Arthur).

THE B0MANTI0 ANNALS OF A NAVAL FAMILY. A New

Cheaper and Edition. Crown 8vo. Cloth, price 5*.

Tbavers (Mar.)

THE 8PINSTEB8 OF BLATCHINGTON. A NoveL 2 vols.
Crown 8vo. Cloth.

Tbevandrum Obsebvations.

0b8ebvati0ns of magnetic declination made at

TBEVANDBUH AND AOUSTIA MALLEY in the Observatories
of his Highness the Maharajah of Travancore, G.C.S.I., in the
Years 1852 to 1860. Being Trevandrum Magnetical Observa-
tions, Volume I. Discussed and Edited by John Allan Brown,
F.B.S., late Director of the Observatories. With an Appendix.
Imp. 4to. Cloth, price £3 3*.

*«* The Appendix, containing Reports on the Observatories and
on Die Public Museum, Public Park, and Gardens at Trevandrum,
pp. XU.-116, may be had separately, price 21*

Henry S. King & Co.'s Publications. 45

Turner (Eev. Charles).

SONNETS, LYEICS, AND TRANSLATIONS. Grown 8vo. Cloth,
price is. 6d.

Tyndall (J.), LL.D., F.E.S.

THE FORKS 07 WATER IN CLOUDS AND RIVERS, ICE
AND GLACIERS. With Twenty-six Illustrations. Sixth
Edition. Grown 8vo. Cloth, price 5*.

Volume I. of the International Scientific Series.

Umbra Oxoniensis.

results of the expostulation of the right

HONOURABLE W. E. GLADSTONE, in their Relation to the
Unity of Roman Catholicism. Large foap. 8vo. Cloth, price 5*.

Upton (Boger D.), Captain late 9th Eoyal Lancers.

NEWMARKET AND ARABIA. An Examination of the
Pescent of Racers and Coursers. With Pedigrees and Frontis-
piece. Post 8to. Cloth, price 9a.

Vambery (Prof. Arminius), of the University of Pesth.

BOKHARA : Its History and Conquest. Demy Svo. Cloth,
price I89.

Van Beneden (Monsieur), Professor of the University

of Louvain, Correspondent of the Institute of France.

ANIMAL PARASITES AND MESSMATES. With 83 Illus.
trations. Second Edition. Cloth, price 5*.
Vol. XIX. of the International Scientific Series.

Vanessa. By the Author of " Thomasina," etc, A
Novel. 2yo1s. Second Edition. Crown 8yo. Cloth.

Vaughan (Bev. C. J.), D.D.

W0R D8 OF HOPE FROM THE. PULPIT OF THE TEMPLE
CHURCH. Third Edition. Crown 8vo. Cloth, price 5«.

THE SOLIDITY OF TRUE RELIGION, and other Sermons
Preached in London during the Election and Mission Week,
February, 1874. Crown 8vo. Cloth, price 3*. 6d.

FORGET THINE OWN PEOPLE* An Appeal for Missions.
Crown 8vo. Cloth, price 3*. 6d.

THE YOUNG LIFE EQUIPPING ITSELF FOR GOD'S SER-
VICE. Being Four Sermons Preached before the University of
Cambridge, in November, 1872. Fourth Edition. Crown 8vo.
Cloth, price 3*. 6d.

46 A List of

Vincent (Capt. 0. K H.), late Royal Welsh Fusiliers.

ELEMENTARY MILITARY GEOGRAPHY, RECONNOITRING,
AND SKETCHING. Compiled for Non-Commissioned Officers
and Soldiers of all Arms. Square crown 8vo. Cloth, price 2s. 6d.

RUSSIA'S ADVANCE EASTWARD. Based on the Official
Beports of Lieutenant Hugo Stumm, German Military Attache'
to the Khivan Expedition. With Map. Crown 8vo. Cloth,
price 6$.

Vizcaya ; or, Life in the Land of the Carlists.

VIZCAYA; or. Life in the Land of the Carlists at the Outbreak
of the Insurrection, with some Account of the Iron Mines and
other Characteristics of the Country. With a Map and Eight
Illustrations. Crown 8vo. Cloth, price 9*.

Vogel (Prof.), Polytechnic Academy of Berlin.

THE CHEMICAL EFFECTS OF LIGHT AND PHOTOGRAPHY,

in their application to Art, Science, and Industry. The trans-
lation thoroughly revised. With 100 Illustrations, including
some beautiful Specimens of Photography. Third Edition.
Crown 8vo, Cloth, price 59.
Volume XV. of the International Scientiflo Series.

Yyner (Lady Mary).

EVERY DAY A PORTION. Adapted from the Bible and
the Prayer Book, for the Private Devotions of those living in
Widowhood. Collected and Edited by Lady Mary Vyner. Square
crown 8vo. Cloth extra, price 5*.

Waiting fob Tidings.

WATTING FOR TIDINGS. By the Author of " White and
Black." 3 vols. Crown 8vo. Cloth.

Wartensleben (Count Hermann von), Colonel in the

Prussian General Staff.

THE OPERATIONS OF THE SOUTH ARMY IN JANUARY
AND FEBRUARY, 1871. Compiled from the Official War Docu-
ments of the Head-quarters of the Southern Army. Translated
by Colonel C. H. von Wright With Maps. Demy 8vo. Cloth,
price 6f.

THE OPERATIONS OF THE FIRST ARMY UNDER GEN.
VON MANTEUFFEL. Translated by Colonel 0. H. von Wright.
Uniform with the above. Demy 8va Cloth, price 9s.

Wedmobe (Frederick).

TWO GIRLS. 2 vols. Crown 8vo. Cloth,

Henry 8. King & Co. 9 * Publications. 47

Wells (Captain John C), K.N.

SPITZBERGEN— THE GATEWAY TO TEX POLYNIA; or, A

Voyage to Spitzbergen. With numerous Illustrations by Whymper
and others, and Map. New and Cheaper Edition. Demy 8vo.
Cloth, prioe 6s.

Wetmore (W. S.).

COMMERCIAL TELEGEAPHIC CODE. .Post 4to. Boards,
price 42«.

What 'tis to Love. By the Author of " Flora Adair,"

" The Value of Fostertown." 3 vols. Crown 8vo. Clo'th.

Whitney (William Dwight). Professor of Sanskrit

and Comparative Philology in Yale College, New Haven.

THE LIFE AND GROWTH OF LANGUAGE. Second Edition.
Crown 8?o. Cloth, prioe 5*. Copyright Edition.
Volume XVI. of the International {Scientific Series.

Whittle (J. Lowry), A.M., Trin. Coll., Dublin.

CATHOLICISM AND THE VATICAN. With a Narrative of the
Old Catholic Congress at Munich. Second Edition. Crown 8vo.
Cloth, prioe 4*. 6<Z.

Wilberfobce (Henry W.)

THE CHURCH AND THE EMPIRES. Historical Periods.
Preceded by a Memoir of the Author by John Henry Newman,
D.D., of the Oratory. With Portrait. Post 8vo. Cloth, price
10*. 6d.

Wilkinson (T. Lean).

SHORT LECTURES ON THE LAND LAWS. Delivered before
the Working Men's College. Crown 8vo. Limp oloth, prioe 2s.

Williams (Eev. Eowland), D.D.

LIFE AND LETTERS OF ROWLAND WILLIAMS, D.D., with
Selections from his Note-books. Edited by Mrs. Rowland
Williams. With a Photographic Portrait. 2 vols. Large post
8vo. Cloth, prioe 24*.

Willoughby (The Hon. Mrs.)

ON THE NORTH WIND— THI8TLED0WN. A Volume of
Poems. Elegantly bound. Small crown 8vo. Cloth, price 7*. 6cZ.

Wilson (H. Schutz).

STUDIES AND ROMANCES. Crown 8vo. Cloth, price 7s. 6ci.

Wintebbotham (Eev. R), M.A., B.Sc.

9ERM0NB AND EXPOSITIONS. Crown 8 vo. Cloth, price 7«. 6d,